Artifact is an AI-driven news aggregation Newsletter focused Product
From the makers of Instagram
Hey Guys,
So I have an interesting scoop that you may not have noticed. Why ChatGPT doesn’t give attribution to our articles, there will be new kinds of “Newsletters”.
The app uses algorithmic predictions, which Kevin Systrom sees as ‘the future of social.’ Yet it’s also a Newsletter product.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are back.
The Instagram co-founders, who departed Facebook in 2018 amid tensions with their parent company, have formed a new venture to explore ideas for next-generation social apps.
What is Artifact?
Artifact, a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to understand your interests and will soon let you discuss those articles with friends.
I hope Substack is going to be part of their aggregator.
The app itself is not yet publicly available but offers a waitlist where interested users can sign up.
So I’ll be honest with you guys, this could be the TikTok of Newsletters, and I’m not even kidding.
The company plans to let users in quickly, Systrom says. You can sign up yourself here; the app is available for both Android and iOS.
So there’s many ways of looking at this, while it’s been compared to other News aggregators, it remains to be seen exactly how it will feel. Maybe like a Substack reader with an algorithm that’s more interactive.
The simplest way to understand Artifact is as a kind of “TikTok for text”, though you might also call it Google Reader reborn as a mobile app or maybe even a surprise attack on Twitter.
I totally missed this, but Artifact — the name represents the merging of articles, facts, and artificial intelligence — opened up its waiting list to the public on January 31st, 2023. But this is right up my alley!
You may remember Google Reader, a long-ago RSS newsreader app that Google shut down back in 2013. This is the Newsletter successor powered by A.I. I actually like Kevin Systrom as a founder.
Inspired by Transformers, Newsletters and TikTok Hybrid
Systrom told Platformer’s Casey Newton (via the Verge) that they were inspired by:
Advances in AI, like Google’s Transformer, which helps computers better understand language and context. (ChatGPT is built on transformer architecture.)
TikTok, which shows users content based on an algorithm, not who they follow.
But few are pointing out how this might be a Newsletter content reader, at the end of the day. The way we read news on social media has changed since Instagram came out. As IG failed to emulate or clone TikTok, it abandoned the roots that made it so great. It missed and failed to capture the short video fad.
The app opens to a feed of popular articles chosen from a curated list of publishers ranging from leading news organizations like The New York Times to small-scale blogs about niche topics. Niche topics eh? That’s where Substack content will come in. Not to mention beehiiv, ghost and LinkedIn Newsletters for instance.
Smart News as a serious aggregator sort of gave in to clickbait you may have noticed in the last six months, while it used to be modular its design has changed for the worse in 2023.
I watched Medium make partnerships with News aggregators for years, I may know a thing or two about it.
In the future, the app will also feature a social component. Systrom and Krieger plan to roll out a feed that will highlight articles from users you follow, alongside their commentary on that content. Additionally, you’ll be able to privately discuss posts through a direct-message inbox. That sounds less like TikTok and more like Reddit, but anyways.
The future of reading news needs an upgrade as platforms have basically abandoned publishers and maligned them with traffic inconsistency which gave rise to the avalanche of paywalls and Newsletters we are currently in.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger practically changed how the world functions when they launched Instagram. This is not a due to be underestimated. They say Artifact represents a first attempt to imagine what the next generation of social apps could look like. They make no mention that I could see of Creators, which is a problem.
Artificat seems to care about the A.I. part of the product, a lot. Tap on articles that interest you, and Artifact will serve you similar posts and stories in the future, just as watching videos on TikTok’s For You page tunes its algorithm over time.
Artifact does sound like a future Substack competitor, in one way or another. It’s not clear if there’s any user-generated-content or anything like that or if it’s just another app to aggregate the News we already trust less and less, including Silicon Valley copypasta some of which is replicated here on Substack.
Some of the quotes by Casey are a bit suspect in the TikTok and A.I. stuff:
“Every time we use machine learning to improve the consumer experience, things got really good really quickly.”
The entire point is choosing our own News, not being fed it by algorithms so I’m a bit stumped. Not a fan of Substack “recommending” me articles in their app either. That’s not the point at all.
If you have serious inquiries on Artifact: inquiries@artifact.news
With the facts in dispute in American news, one really does wonder.
Do I want Silicon Valley clickbait or do I want new perspectives on niches and speculative pieces or educational content? Do I really want Axios like snappy (Short-form) Newsletters on everything?
In one sense, Artifact can feel like a throwback. Inspired by TikTok’s success, big social platforms have spent the past few years chasing shortform video products and the ad revenue that comes with them. - Casey Newton
If this is the News of text, then this is actually more like a Twitter competitor. Artifact has its sights set firmly on text.
Text based
News worthy
Like a TikTok for written News
A lot of compatibility with Newsletter content
Substack doesn’t typically make aggregation partners (as far as I can tell)
Systrom and Krieger first began discussing the idea for what became Artifact a couple years ago.
The tech that enabled ChatGPT also created new possibilities for social networks
If Substack wants to get away from Ads and algorithms, it looks like Artifact actually worships the TikTok process. E.g. At first, social networks showed you stuff your friends thought was interesting — the Facebook model. Then they started showing you stuff based on the people that you chose to follow, whether you were friends or not — the Twitter model.
TikTok’s innovation was to show you stuff using only algorithmic predictions, regardless of who your friends are or who you followed. It soon became the most downloaded app in the world.
Recently, , Tokyo-based SmartNews, which uses similar AI technology to personalize recommendations, laid off 40 percent of its workforce in the United States and China amid a declining user base and challenging ad market.
A.I. and News may not be the best answer in the trust crisis of media. Systrom does not seem to understand the intricacies of what has come before in text or news. Like most startups at this stage, Artifact has yet to commit to a business model. Advertising would be an obvious fit, Systrom said. He’s also interested in thinking about revenue-sharing deals with publishers.
Artifact would work well if it leveraged the peer recommmendations Subsack and beehiiv are using. If Artifact gets big, it could help readers find new publications and encourage them to subscribe to them; it may make sense for Artifact to try to take a cut. I guess it will have to learn the hard way of where others have failed, it will try again.
I think Artifact will try to be high-brow and focus on quality:
Artifact will take seriously the job of serving readers with high-quality news and information.
That means an effort to include only publishers who adhere to editorial standards of quality.
I’m not sure how that translates into virality or immersion for readers though? Artifact will also remove individual posts that promote falsehoods. Not sure how they plan to do that. What’s actually refreshing about Substack is that they don’t do that, they don’t intervene whenever possible in that 1 to 1 relationship between authors and their audiences.
Measuring Reading Time with A.I.
An imporatnt innovation that Medium built into their somewhat scammy platform is reading time analysis. So Artifact will also enable machine-learning systems that will be primarily optimized to measure how long you spend reading about various subjects — as opposed to, say, what generates the most clicks and comments — in an effort to reward more deeply engaging material.
So over time it will get a more personalized idea about what to serve a reader. That sort of back-end reader experience optimization could be valuable over time as it gets better at that.
Casey said that for now, Systrom and Krieger are funding Artifact themselves. I’m sure that stage won’t last long. But publishing at the intersection of the TikTok of Text isn’t exactly necessarily a winning idea, it’s very hard to implement and get traction with. The thing is the competition of aggregators and News readers is just so bad.
Having sold Instagram to Facebook for $715 million, Systrom and Krieger had no pressing need to get a job.
I’m glad to see them trying a new startup idea, even if Artifact is a bit of a dark horse idea. With Medium on the verge of being dead, we definately need new blood in how we read text news articles and Newsletters in one place or on one app.
Read an article inside the app, and when you return to the feed, it will suggest more stories like it in a handsome carousel.
They clearly want Artifact to be social, like Twitter, but more based on deeper reading.
News aggregators tend to eat money and die very fast, so it will be interesting to see what makes this one unique. I think they will get into the Newsletter economy in a big way, because that’s the direction media has gone in in recent years.
Fashioned as a sort of TikTok for news, the social app will let users read articles from big and small publishers alike, and, over time, suggests news stories based on their interests. I just hope some of those niche and small publishers are people like you and I on Substack, time will tell.