Instagram creators come up with AI news app Artifact

The app is not out yet, but there is already a waiting list for it: Artifact. It’s the new app from the creators of Instagram. No social media, but a news app with artificial intelligence.

artifact

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are the men behind the Artifact app. The intention is to offer a personalized news experience that is put together with the help of artificial intelligence. The men are happy that they can give free rein to their curiosity and creativity. For that reason, they left Instagram in 2018, although there was also gossip about possible problems between the duo and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

They have spent the past four years not only working on Artifact, but also developing a website where people could see the spread of the coronavirus. Artifact is therefore something completely different and although you cannot use the app yourself yet, the gentlemen have probably released a screenshot:

For You page

You can see on a kind of For You page what news you are probably interested in. The gentlemen themselves call it a surprise attack on Twitter and compare it to TikTok, but for text. For example, you can see news from the New York Times. We do not know whether it is mainly English-oriented: so whether Artifact will also display news from Androidworld, for example, remains to be seen.

Once you click on an article (in short, putting smart headlines above an article is even more important), the algorithm learns that you are interested and you will be presented with this type of news more often. You can also comment on articles and find them in the app. And there is a social media touch to it, because you can also follow which topics the people you follow find interesting. You can also send each other direct messages if you want to talk further about a topic.

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Danger of doom scrolling

It’s not all random, that presenting news: when you sign up, you have to choose 10 or more topics. The question is, however, whether the ‘doom scrolling’ does not encourage: ending up in a kind of -often negative- spiral of a certain subject. This is dangerous, for example, for people who suffer from anorexia, who all see messages about diets, in addition to the fact that it is also exciting to what extent attention is paid to the spread of fake news.

When Artifact appears exactly, that is still unknown. Do you see an app like this? Leave it now in the comments.

Photo source: Roman Kraft via Unsplash