Artifact, the personalized news aggregation app, is expanding its scope beyond the latest headlines and is now transforming into a platform for discovering a wide range of intriguing content. Following its recent update that allowed users to share not only links but also organic posts, the AI-powered app, created by Instagram’s co-founders, is introducing a new feature for sharing favorite places, such as restaurants, bars, shops, or any spot worth recommending to friends.
This addition reshapes the app once more, turning it into a versatile discovery engine for the broader web, potentially positioning it as a competitor to the likes of Twitter or X. It empowers Artifact users to establish themselves as curators who can amass followers by sharing their recommendations, insights, and now, popular locations.
The capability to share places has become an integral part of the posting experience on Artifact. Users can simply tap the plus “+” icon to create posts featuring their own titles, text, and images. Initially, Artifact was primarily geared toward suggesting posts related to restaurant reviews, how-to guides, family recipes, app reviews, design inspiration, and more. This change in direction moved the app closer to the territory of X, as it now accommodates organic content, with or without links. While X predominantly focused on text-based posts over the years, Artifact has recently incorporated generative AI tools to enhance posts with attention-grabbing images.
AI technology plays a significant role within Artifact, driving its recommendation engine and enabling the rewriting of clickbait headlines and summarizing news stories for readers. These AI summaries are now accessible when readers click through a headline to view the full article in Artifact’s in-app Safari web browser. The app also offers features for commenting and saving articles for later, accessible both in the native mobile app and through Safari’s share extension.
In the announcement of these updates on Instagram Threads, Artifact co-founder Mike Krieger highlighted the role of AI in the app’s development. As of last month, Artifact had approximately 400,000 mobile app downloads, according to data.ai, a market intelligence provider.
Since its public launch in February 2023, Artifact has been rapidly rolling out new features, including user profiles, commenting, link sharing, and more. This has led to speculation about whether the app is aiming to directly compete with X. Krieger has acknowledged that there’s a “flavor” of Twitter/X he’d like to incorporate into Artifact, with the aim of helping users discover trending stories. However, this goal has yet to be fully realized.
Rather than a direct X competitor, Artifact seems to be evolving into something more akin to Flipboard with its curated news magazines or perhaps Pinterest, serving as a discovery platform for inspirational web content. The lack of a singular, defined focus may lead to some confusion about what Artifact’s core purpose is – is it primarily a news app, a discovery tool, a recommendation platform, or an X alternative? Time will ultimately determine Artifact’s trajectory, but for now, it’s one of several platforms where users can scroll through news, links, and content that piques their interest.
