Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger created a news app called Artifact, but unfortunately, the Artifact news app is shutting down just a year after it was launched. The app used artificial intelligence (AI) to suggest news articles to users based on their interests. However, it didn’t gain enough popularity, leading the Artifact team to decide to stop working on it.
Kevin Systrom, the CEO, mentioned in a blog post that although a core group of users loved the app, they concluded that the market for it wasn’t big enough to justify further investment. The process of winding down the app has already started. Users can no longer add new comments or posts, but they can continue reading news on Artifact until the end of February.
Artifact introduced several features since its launch in January 2023, such as AI-powered article summaries, the ability to comment on articles within the app, and the option to mark articles as clickbait and then have them rewritten using AI. It expanded beyond just news by allowing users to share interesting and engaging web links and use a Twitter-like posts feature. However, features like comments and posts required more moderation and oversight than the team could provide with its current staff of eight people.
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More Details on the Shut Down of Artifact News App
Kevin Systrom mentioned that the team members will now go their separate ways. Despite the closure of Artifact, he expressed personal excitement about continuing to build new things. He believes that the possibilities for new ideas in the field of AI are vast and limitless. So, this is an interesting decision to shut down the Artifact news app.
Artifact’s closure is happening at a time when there’s increased competition among Twitter rivals, but also a decline in the usage of other news aggregators, like SmartNews. SmartNews faced challenges in 2023, including layoffs and a change in its CEO, while its app experienced a decrease in both downloads and active users. The way people discover news and information is evolving with the introduction of AI.
Simultaneously, publishers are grappling with their content being utilized in AI training data, which is then accessed by users of bots like OpenAI ChatGPT. This has resulted in legal issues, including lawsuits in some instances, as well as licensing agreements in others. The changing scenario of consumption of news and the integration of AI are influencing both user behavior and the relationships between publishers and the AI platforms.
So, this was all about the closure of the Artifact News App by Instagram.
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