A new app, Artifact, developed by the Instagram founders, could rival Twitter when it comes to reading news and lifestyle articles.
The latest thing to be trending on social media is a new text-based news app powered by an artificial intelligence (AI) called Artifact.
Dubbed by many as the “TikTok of the news,” the service was developed by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the duo who founded the photo-sharing app Instagram and sold it to Facebook in 2012.
But what is it? In a nutshell, Artifact is a personalized news feed that, like TikTok, uses machine learning to understand your interests and, with the help of algorithms, find stories (videos) that you might be interested in. ) instead of .
The advantage of this platform is that it is designed to avoid the so-called “filter bubble”. This is an ideologically biased state that occurs when algorithms selectively infer and filter out information users want to see based on past click behavior.
This is even more interesting given how news consumption is changing.
proportion of people read news online However, despite a sizeable number of well-informed citizens, 2022 was also the year that more people accessed news via social media rather than news websites.
Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2022 People are more likely to read news on social media last year than on direct news websites, according to the report.
People are increasingly consuming fast, short, concise information. But could an app like Artifact act as a middleman?
Systrom said it could be a potential competitor to social media platforms like Twitter for reading news and lifestyle articles.
This is a “particularly timely moment in both the tech industry, with Elon’s acquisition of Twitter and Facebook’s focus on the Metaverse,” he said. financial times.
I tried Artifact. How does it work?
After downloading and registering an account, Artifact asks you to choose 10 or more topics of interest, followed by reading at least 25 articles to learn more about yourself. It says, “Feed gets better with every read.”
As usual, topic selection is almost an exercise in self-deception. I chose topics related to my work, such as tech companies, startups, AI, space, education, science, and health.
Once you select your subject matter of interest, the application allows you to add paid subscriptions to various publications such as The New York Times, Atlantic, Vogue, The Economist and prioritize them within your feed. .
Then things really start.
Artifact makes me realize that the real themes I’m interested in aren’t exactly the things I’m actively working on, but mental health, exercise, relationships (breakups!), and interior design. It didn’t take long.
According to the app, after reading 25 articles, AI and tech companies came last in an infographic summarizing the categories I liked the most.
The more I read, the more my feed read, “How Young Couples Talk About Money in Relationships,” “We’ve Been Debating Lab Leaky Hypotheses Are All Wrong,” “You What language does your mind speak?” and more beautifully selected articles. “Spotify’s latest feature offers an AI-powered personal DJ,” and “How a couple transformed this humble two-family home in Brooklyn.”
For those reading this who don’t know me, these could be a big reveal about myself and my personality.
Artifact’s algorithm recommends me a large number of opinion articles, quite a few lists, and here and there obvious clickbait articles. It’s based in France, but there are a lot of American-based stories as well.
Ultimately, the app didn’t appeal to me and I stopped using it after researching this issue. However, my notifications remain on, so strangely they don’t bother me or bother me. Push banners are interesting, informative, and less tempting than Instagram, making them significantly less expendable.
AI-powered summaries and “clickbait” warnings
It remains to be seen what impact Artifact will have compared to how TikTok’s algorithm works. But the promise is certainly interesting, an app betting on whether people will actually take the time to read the content.
One piece of good news worth noting is that Artifact aims its algorithm to recommend content that may challenge previous views.
A report found that on nearly every continent, supporters of opposing political camps are becoming increasingly polarized and more likely to interact in more hostile ways than they were decades ago. is particularly strong. A report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“For us, it’s very important to dedicate part of the feed to irrelevant interests, to other aspects of the problem, to exploring publishers we don’t normally see,” Systrom told the Financial Times. told to
Artifact also works with a rigorous list of curated sources that are submitted to users’ feeds because the co-founders want to ensure the quality of their news and information.
The app has introduced many updates since its January release.
For those who are too busy to read the entire article, or want to see a preview before diving into the content, there are different styles that pop up above the story (the famous ChatGPT prompt ‘I wish I was 5 years old’). You can check out AI-powered summaries of
Artifact now allows users to follow individual writers, comment on articles, and respond with a variety of emojis, but also report clickbait and misleading headlines.
