The End of Artifact

January 13, 2024 5:43 AM

Created by Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, AI-powered news app Artifact is no more. A statement from Systrom on the closure.
posted by mittens (9 comments total)

I could have sworn I first heard of Artifact here, but can't find the post or comment about it. I really enjoyed its news aggregation and it became a daily read for me. The AI (such that it was) definitely wasn't perfect--sensing that you were interested in a topic, it would then serve you a lot of that topic--but I suppose the greater problem wasn't Artifact's, it was just the media landscape, where a vast number of sites digest actual articles and interviews into hundreds of content-entries. But Artifact offered some good filtering functions to prune all that back, and it was easy enough to flip over to the headlines tab to get a broader view of the news. I was not overjoyed by the introduction of social features--commenting on news stories seems to already be well-covered by other sites--but understood the vision for more engagement. And now I guess I need to find some other way to connect myself to the constant drip-feed of news!
posted by mittens at 6:03 AM on January 13 [1 favorite]

Have we not yet come to the conclusion that tailored news is inherently toxic? There's a lot of pearl-clutching about Our Divided Society, etc., but that's always going to be a natural consequence of a society where there are increasingly few universal experiences. You may hate the NYT for [waves hands at panoply of reasons], but at least for a long time it was a shared constant. Now the statement "have you seen what's on the front page of the Times" is meaningless, because it changes by the minute, and I'm not even sure it's not an algorithmic feed at this point.
posted by phooky at 6:25 AM on January 13 [7 favorites]

I used Artifact for the better part of the year after I quit Twitter. It was okay, but it seemed like it lacked curation.

After a while, I only got stories from a couple of sources, and they were mid to low quality. It did make me wonder if there really isn’t that much high quality ungated news on the web anymore.

Artifact didn’t have a “music” category, which baffled me.

In the end, I guess I just kind of stopped using it. Cool idea, but it seemed like it was made for a different world than ours.
posted by tehgubner at 6:32 AM on January 13

I first heard of Artifact this morning when I read John Gruber's Daring Fireball. News apps, AI-powered or not, aren't a big thing for me. I scan the headlines mostly, it's all my fragile mental health can deal with these days. Sounds like I'm not alone. And they weren't going to survive as a niche product.
posted by tommasz at 7:44 AM on January 13 [2 favorites]

Think about walking into a library that only shows you what it thinks you would like - but with adverts! - and you’ll start to see how vapid and shallow this concept is. This app only existed because of the star power of the two founders, who created an online space (instagram) that was extremely friendly to corporate advertising. Expecting lightening to strike twice was not smart.
posted by The River Ivel at 9:14 AM on January 13 [1 favorite]

Have we not yet come to the conclusion that tailored news is inherently toxic?

Given the passionate followings of MSNBC and Fox News among older folks, and Tiktok among the younger ones? Quite evidently not.
posted by doctornemo at 10:24 AM on January 13 [1 favorite]

But I also love tailored news, at least the way I do it.

I've tweaked Google News to show me more about certain topics I am interested in: geopolitics, climate change, AI, higher education, science fiction, horror. I've convinced it not to show me sports or celebrity stories. It's a win.
posted by doctornemo at 10:26 AM on January 13

I guess part of the reason my experience was overall positive, thinking over The River Ivel's comment, and John Gruber's complaint, is that I never saw ads? I can see why that would be maddening. And yes, to doctornemo's point, tailored news is great if it's about tailoring topics, rather than spraying you with a firehose of op-eds that agree with you.
posted by mittens at 11:36 AM on January 13 [2 favorites]

Machine learning “AI” and not the massively more toxic LLM “AI”, so unable to pick up on the firehose of VC cash for that sort of thing.
posted by Artw at 11:51 AM on January 13