Here’s why Elon Musk called Grok Imagine ‘the new AI Vine’

The tech billionaire Elon Musk has sparked nostalgia and curiosity by calling Grok Imagine, the latest feature of his artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok, “the new AI Vine.”

The comparison immediately caught the attention of internet users who remember Vine as the birthplace of viral short-form content.

Vine: Short-video platform

Before TikTok dominated the short-video landscape, there was Vine, a quirky, chaotic platform that let users upload six-second looping videos. 

Launched in 2012 and acquired by Twitter (now X) before its official release, Vine became a cultural phenomenon.

From comedy sketches and dance trends to absurdist humour, it gave rise to early internet stars and helped shape meme culture.

However, despite its popularity, Vine was shut down by Twitter in 2017 due to monetisation issues, management missteps, and growing competition.

Grok Imagine: Short-form video with an AI twist

Now, Musk has introduced that Vine-style creativity back but through the lens of AI. His company xAI has introduced Grok Imagine, a new feature in beta that lets users generate 6-second video clips from simple text prompts.

Taking to X (formerly Twitter), Musk wrote in a post, "Grok Imagine is AI Vine!" framing it as the spiritual and technological successor to the original app.

According to xAI, the tool takes written descriptions, such as “a robot dancing in a neon city” or “alien tribal woman walking through fire” and turns them into animated, sound-backed video clips.

The feature combines the capabilities of generative AI with short-form content, creating a fast, creative visual experience driven entirely by imagination.

The AI videos are not just abstract art, they’re generated with real-world visuals and audio, similar to emerging text-to-video models in the generative AI space.

Moreover, in a surprising twist, Musk also revealed that X has recovered the original Vine video archive, long believed to be lost.

“We recently found the Vine video archive and are working on restoring user access,” Musk shared in a follow-up post.

For now, Grok Imagine is only available to users on the $30/month SuperGrok premium tier, with others able to join a waitlist.