Artifact: A News App Founded by Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, and the Emergence of Machine Learning-Assisted Headline Rewriting

While talking with Systrom, I wondered if Artifact has ambitions to automatically rewrite every headline using AI — if the clickbait marker is already a hit with users, what if they love what the AI writes for them? Fortunately, it doesn’t sound like that’s in the cards. “I really appreciate and respect the editorial authority that publishers and writers have over their content,” Systrom says. It is only targeted at the most egregious cases which can lead to issues for users.

It’s a fascinating — and fast — evolution of a feature that only rolled out last week to Artifact, the new app from Instagram’s co-founders that’s kind of like a TikTok for text.

Humans at Artifact will also be reviewing a queue of headlines that are rewritten the most and can choose to push a revised headline to all Artifact users, Systrom says. This is a manual process at the moment and could become automatic down the line.

The invasion of chatbots has disrupted the plans of countless businesses, including some that had been working on that very technology for years (looking at you, Google). But not Artifact, the news discovery app created by Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. When I talked to him about his upcoming startup Artifact, which is expected to be a follow-up to Meta, he said that it is a product of the recent artificial intelligence revolution. In fact, Systrom says that he and Krieger started with the idea of exploiting the powers of machine learning—and then ended up with a news app after scrounging around for a serious problem that AI could help solve.

It’s difficult to find individually relevant, high-quality news articles, and not have to wade through irrelevant clickbait, misleading partisan cant, and low-calorie distraction to get those stories. Artifact delivers a standard feed with links to news stories and headlines. The content of the stories themselves is what determines the ranking and selection, just like the links displayed on social media. If there is content for each user, it should be from publications that are reliable.