The Artifact app will be completely different from other social platforms in terms of judgments and false information posting. This will be achieved due to the underlying AI technology.
Four years after leaving Instagram, its co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have come up with a new initiative, which is Artifact – a news feed application. The app is in private beta now, the waiting list to join was opened yesterday. Artifact is available for both Android and iOS.
It's been a minute, but @mikeyk and I are back at it with Artifact – a personalized news feed using the latest ai tech. Visit https://t.co/bGIGGIH9sd to sign up and join the community.
— Kevin Systrom (@kevin) January 31, 2023
The name itself suggests that the application is about articles and facts. Driven by artificial intelligence (AI), Artifact offers personalized news content based on your interests. The range of articles varies from New York Times content to small blogs.
Currently, the Artifact team is testing two features. The first one is a feed with articles posted by people you follow, along with their comments on each post. The second one is a direct message inbox so you can discuss the posts privately with friends.
As the co-founders have said, the app will be completely different from other social platforms in terms of judgments and false information posting. This will be achieved due to the underlying AI technology.
Kevin Systrom said:
“Throughout the years, what I saw was that every time we use machine learning to improve the consumer experience, things got really good really quickly.”
He added:
“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. Right? Just make the hard decision.”
Some have already called the app “a surprise attack on Twitter.” And it might be true, especially after numerous cases of false information spread on the social media platform. Back in 2021, when the world was still combating the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation about the virus was spreading faster than the virus itself. At that time, the company suspended more than 11,000 accounts and removed more than 100,000 pieces of content for violating the policy
Artifact promises to remove individual posts that promote false data. And its machine-learning systems will be primarily optimized to measure how long you spend reading about various subjects as an effort to reward more deeply engaging material. The startup is yet to have a defined business model but Systrom says advertising would be a fit.
After leaving Instagram back in 2018 following the tension over Instagram’s autonomy, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger created rt.live, a website for tracking how fast COVID-19 is spreading in each state. One of the features of the project was the ability to filter by region so you could see how the Western states were doing better at suppressing the virus than those in the South.
Now, Instagram co-founders are focused on Artifact. The project’s idea is really good, but the creators will have to work hard on competing with existing similar apps.
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