Entertainment
Twitter Boss Signals The Beginning Of The End For AI
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Before Elon Musk bought the social media platform and Grokked it up, Jack Dorsey was the CEO of Twitter. Now, he has funded diVine, an ambitious project that aims to bring back Vine, a beloved TikTok precursor where users could upload six-second videos.
Perhaps the most startling thing about diVine is that it prevents users from uploading AI videos, arguably signaling the beginning of the end for a disruptive technology with increasingly diminishing returns.
The Beginning of the End for AI
AI-generated video has become a dominant force in online spaces, where users flood apps like TikTok and YouTube with fake videos that make these platforms increasingly difficult to navigate. AI trailers for movies are often mistaken for the real thing, for example, which resulted in a YouTube crackdown on fake trailer uploaders following an explosive Deadline expose. These platforms can only do so much to fix what has become a persistent problem: namely, that there’s so much AI slop that it has become increasingly difficult to find content actually created by human beings.
To my knowledge, diVine is the only major social media platform to solve that problem by simply forbidding AI content altogether. This idea came from app creator Evan Henshaw-Plath, who told TechCrunch that companies are making a mistake by focusing on their users’ AI engagement. The talented programmer thinks users long for more “agency over…social experiences” and that “there’s a nostalgia for the early Web 2.0 era, for the blogging era, for the era that gave us podcasting, the era that you were building communities, instead of just gaming the algorithm.”
More New Apps Will Be Ditching AI Altogether
For those who share this nostalgia, diVine sounds like a very potent return to what many of us see as the good old days of the internet. Ironically enough, though, I can’t help but feel like this return to the past is also a powerful portent of the future. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is funding an app that is leveraging its complete and utter lack of AI as a major marketing point.
This is going to become increasingly common with new apps for the simple reason that older apps have continued to make themselves worse with their increasingly intrusive AI integration. In addition to all the annoying fake videos, Facebook drives users crazy with “features” like incorrect AI conversation summaries and a frustratingly awful “Ask Meta” function that you can trigger just by trying to do a search. It’s a platform filled with more ugly AI art and fake videos every day, and now even conversations between real humans are being disrupted by artificial unintelligence.
On Twitter, Elon Musk’s pet AI Grok is advertised as being an impartial bastion of truth, but it’s always one algorithm change away from declaring itself MechaHitler or declaring that Musk himself is the world’s greatest human, one who could beat Mike Tyson in a fight. Both of those things happened this year… heck, the greatest human thing happened just a few days ago! Even when Grok isn’t publicly pampering its owner, its primary use is to explain things to users who ask, essentially replacing human conversation with an empty summary.
The End of the AI Slop Era
The sad truth is that we’re living in the AI slop era: even outside of traditional social media platforms, Amazon has been flooded with AI-written books, Comic-Cons are flooded with AI art, and internet forums are flooded by AI posts. It’s gotten so bad that I’m lobbying for a federal law requiring that all AI-generated content and products be labeled as such, allowing people to decide whether they want to invest their time and money in something created by a prompt rather than by talent. If that happens, I’m confident the market will confirm that people are willing to pay extra for something authentic rather than artificial.
Until then, we can only hope diVine leads the way in more apps, creating online spaces where AI slop is expressly forbidden. The tech bros and uncreative people fascinated with this high-tech toy can keep swapping the soulless crap they call art with each other and share high fives about being such highly skilled “prompt engineers.” The rest of us will focus on doing what we did before AI began ruining every single corner of the internet: connecting with other humans and discovering what they have to say via genuine conversations, art, and literature.
