Artifact, the personalized news app curated by artificial intelligence, is closing windows and blocking comments just a year after launching from the minds of former Instagram founders.
“We built something that our core user base loved, but we concluded that the market opportunity wasn’t gigantic enough to justify continuing to invest in this way,” wrote co-founder Kevin Systrom in an article Average ad. “It’s straightforward for a startup to ignore this reality, but often making the challenging decision sooner is better for everyone involved… We live in exhilarating times where artificial intelligence is changing almost everything we touch and the possibilities for up-to-date ideas seem endless.”
The app was created by Systrom and Mike Krieger, co-founders of Instagram, who left in 2018 to pursue up-to-date ventures, including tackling what Sytrom called “existential crises“challenging the news industry and the habits of overwhelmed users.
“News and information remain key areas for startup investment,” Systrom wrote. “We are at a critical juncture where many publications are closing or struggling, local news has all but disappeared and larger publishers have strained relationships with leading technology companies. I hope that technology will find ways to preserve, support and develop these institutions…”
Artifact launched in January 2023 and was initially billed as a pure consumer channel featuring “news, facts and artificial intelligence”, aiming to exploit machine learning to curate relevant news and posts from journalists, e.g. TikTok for messaging on Your website.
By April, however, the app had also expanded into content creation, allowing customization of profiles, comment threads, and a voting system that, according to Mashable’s Christianna Silva, was strikingly similar to the Reddit user experience. “While this may make Artifact more compelling for users, it also opens a Pandora’s box of moderation problems,” Silva wrote of Artifact’s then newly unveiled “reputation scores.” “It’s demanding to imagine a news-only app that beats the mind-numbing joy (and pain and fear and anger…) we get from Instagram and TikTok.”
Despite initial acclaim from news professionals and users alike, Artifact appears unable to overcome the rapid growth of popular social media sites and the increasingly inevitable fizzle of the AI hype.
The ability to comment and publish has been officially disabled, but Artifact users can view the messages until the end of February.
