Jack Dorsey’s former boss revives Vine to escape ‘AI Slop’

The revamped version of Vine may be the one place to escape artificial intelligence on the internet.

Evan Henshaw-Plath, one of the original developers of Twitter — who notably hired Jack Dorsey in 2006 — is nostalgic for an era where the internet wasn’t filled with “AI slop.”

Evidently he’s not alone.

Last month, he launched DiVine, a revival of the defunct six-second video app Vine. It crashed within hours of first going live as nearly 150,000 people tried to download it in a single day.

While many were eager to be able to access old content they made on Vine, Henshaw-Plath said the main appeal is that DiVine is artificial intelligence-free. There’s no creepy algorithm feeding content to users. People get to decide for themselves what they see. The app relies on a verification tool that proofs every video uploaded and ensures it comes from a camera rather than AI.

“We want a world where we get to choose whether or not we’re looking at AI content, and big platforms have just decided that everyone should switch to AI slop, and people don’t want it,” he told me.

Henshaw-Plath left Silicon Valley after his stint at Twitter for a slower life in New Zealand with family. He launched DiVine as part of a new hackers collective named “and Other Stuff” that he started with Dorsey this year. 

It’s part of an effort to rethink social media to make it more decentralized and user-controlled rather than corporate-owned ecosystems where big tech companies would make profit.

While he knew that a safe space away from AI would be a core tenet of the DiVine, Henshaw-Plath realized he also wanted to go further and make sure people had control over what they saw — not just whether it was AI-generated.

“The problem with the algorithms and the problem with AI isn’t necessarily that they exist,” he said. “It’s who controls them, and what are they optimized for?” Henshaw-Plath told me. 

“What are they trying to do? Are they for us, or are they for someone else who does not have our interests in mind?”

Henshaw-Plath realized combining an old-school product like Vine with his new ideas — user control and prohibiting any AI videos from being uploaded — would be the perfect vehicle.

This social media “thrives on the constraints,” he said. “You need to figure out how to find the essence of storytelling, the essence of communication [in six seconds].” In other words, brevity is still the soul of wit.

And it’s struck a chord. He had planned a modest beta test capped at 10,000 users, but it filled in just three or four hours. Another 145,000 people tried to join after that, forcing him to frantically shut down new sign-ups while he “sat down and reworked all the servers.” Until that moment, he was the only person actually working on the app.

“I thought this would be exciting to people who were nostalgic about an Internet of the past,” Henshaw-Plath said. “I did not think it would resonate so widely.”

Henshaw-Plath’s philosophy is baked into DiVine’s DNA. The app is built on a “Social Media Bill of Rights” that he drafted. It establishes principles like users should own their names and audience relationships, choose their own algorithms, set rules for their communities, and be able to leave one platform and move to another without losing everything.

Though he wrote all of DiVine’s initial code himself, the app operates on an open-source model similar to Wikipedia or Linux. DiVine accepts public contributions from volunteer developers. Henshaw-Plath admits that he doesn’t even know how many people are currently working on the app. 

In the last few months he has also begun building out the team — hiring contractors and working with cloud providers for infrastructure. But he told me the philosophy for the app is still communal: social media should work like the open web, collectively built and governed, not controlled by a single corporation.

After less than 30 minutes of chatting, Plath excused himself to log off and get back to coding — in an effort to allow millions of people on the app in the coming months. 

“I’m hopeful that it will be a viable alternative to corporate social media platforms, a platform where people can find meaning and community and happiness,” he said.