The co-founders of Instagram have revealed a new app, Artifact, which promises to be a “personalised” news feed “driven by artificial intelligence”.
In essence, Artifact is a news feed that uses machine learning to understand your interests and, soon, will let you discuss the articles you’ve read with friends. That’s right, you’ll have to read the news articles found on Artifact.
The app opens to a feed of popular articles chosen from a curated list of publishers including The New York Times, as well as small blogs on niche topics. When you tap on an article to read it, Artifact will remember and serve you similar stories in the future — just like TikTok.
And, just like TikTok, there will be a feed for publications that you are following and a central ranked feed akin to the For You page. There will also be a private message inbox so you can chat about posts with friends.
The name, if you’re wondering, is apparently a portmanteau “articles,” “facts,” and “artificial intelligence.”
Artifact is powered by the same language-parsing tech as ChatGPT.
In terms of business model, co-founder Kevin Systrom told The Verge that advertising would be a natural fit but it was also considering looking into revenue-sharing models with publishers.
Of course, apps and services promising personalised news feeds have been tried before and haven’t really taken off. Flipboard might be the most successful analogue to Artifact, along with Apple and Google News. But, as ever with online news, there is the problem of politics.
At the moment, right- and left-leaning publications are included. However, Systrom said that the company will be judicious in deciding who gets to play and who doesn’t.
“One of the issues with technology recently has been a lot of these companies’ unwillingness to make subjective judgments in the name of quality and progress for humanity,” he said. “Right? Just make the hard decision.”
The company also promises to remove individual posts that promote falsehoods and the machine-learning will be primarily optimised to measure how long users spend reading various subjects, rather than what simply gets the most clicks or comments.
While the premise sounds good in theory, the timing seems remarkably poor. The online news market is incredibly depressed with publishers big and small struggling to make ends meet. Plus, with a recession looming, generating funds for the app will be hard (it is currently self-funded by the co-founders, though they have plenty of cash after selling Instagram to Meta). Add to that a slowing digital ad market and you’ve got a recipe for a damp squib.
