The word real is starting to mean different things to different people on the internet.
My buddy just sent me this news:

OG Twitter-founder Jack Dorsey is rebooting Vine (now called ‘diVine’) as a 6-second looping social video app, with a hard ban on AI-generated content.

I grew up on Vine.

I came of age in 2013-2016, at a time when most social media was still text- or image-based. Since then everything has changed and part of me yearns a bit for the nostalgia of yore.

So I was excited to hear that Jack was bringing it back.

What makes this exciting isn’t just the 6-second videos or the 500K+ archived OG Vines coming back with it. Those are all of course very nice and reiminiscent of a simper time.

But to me most compelling part is that AI will not be tolerated.

All content will be verified via C2PA (an open content provenance standard) or recorded live in-app.

This is an exciting stance for a few reasons. Partly because it coincides well with Vine’s nostalgia, and partly because of the precedent it sets.

Because once one platform requires content provenance, the whole creator economy starts to shift around it. Think about this:

> YouTube just launched an AI music generator.
> TikTok and IG rolled out AI Avatar tools.
> Every other platform is racing toward this future
> Where you can't tell the difference between real and fake

And frankly, they dont seem to care as long as people watch.
But I suspect that people will stop watching soon enough if the trend continues.
And if it does the entire creator economy value prop fundamentally changes.

Provenance addresses this.

It’s an old idea, believe it evolved in the world of art as a way of verifying origin (and thus, ‘value’).

Ex: a Banksy is only a Banksy if you can trace where it came from, who touched it, where it's been. That chain of custody = the value of the thing.

Importantly, the signature isn't the art.
But without the signature, the art is just paint.

So the fact that Jack is taking a principled stance here on excluding AI, at a time when ~literally~ everyone else is leaning in, feels important.

He zigged. Quite the zig considering the industry's zag.

This has the potential to lead social media, and the creator economy, in a completely new direction. Here's where I think this lands;:

Near term, content provenance becomes a line item in creator partnership deals.

Not a year from now - sooner.
Brands will lead the charge, not platforms.

Think about this: you're paying $50k for a creator to integrate your ad into their video, and you find out half the personality is AI-stitched.

That's a fraud problem with a paper trail.

AI-disclosure clauses pop up in creator agreements faster than most agencies expect. Verified-human creators start commanding a CPM premium - meaningful enough that the smart talent agencies build "verified human" rosters.

Then the creator economy quietly splits: AI-augmented (cheap, abundant) and verified-human (scarce, expensive). ¹

That's the near-term move. The medium-term one is bigger.

Within three to five years, verified human is a regulatory and marketing category - talking certifying bodies, label disputes, eventually FTC guidance.

Brands print it on packaging.
Politicians legislate around it.
C2PA becomes the USDA Organic of the internet.

It becomes a differentiator, a status symbol.

And by the same token, screen time will also become something of a status symbol. People who spend less time doomscrolling TikTok will be seen as ‘enlightened’ or whatever you want to call them. Those that do spend considerable time watching AI generated slop will be scene as lesser.

And then the spicy one, which I feel less sure about but more excited to be wrong about: the AI-leaning platforms get re-priced.

Public-market valuations of Meta, YouTube, TikTok take a multiple haircut over time as advertisers route spend toward authenticated inventory. Else they embrace the C2PA themselves and use it to stratify the content on their platforms.

Ad-supported AI feeds get hammered the same way ad-supported TV got hammered when streaming hit.

Jack didn't just launch an app.
He frontran a reweighting of the whole attention economy.

In a surprise twist of events
AI slop has actually made authenticity a category.
The category just hasn't gotten its label yet.
Until perhaps now

I’ll be curious to see whether diVine itself wins or flops.

But I don't think what matters more is the door it just swung open.

Peace,
Ramsey