Almost a year after launching, Artifact, the AI-powered messaging app developed by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, is shutting down due to a lack of user adoption.
The app used artificial intelligence to curate news articles based on users’ interests. Despite introducing features like AI-generated article summaries, social media connectivity, and AI-based clickbait headline mitigation, Artifact apparently failed to attract a large enough user base to justify further investment.
Short-lived promise of AI newsrooms
“We’ve built something that a core group of users love, but we’ve decided that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to justify further investment like this.”, said Systrom in a blog postin which he announced the discontinuation of the project.
Artifact will no longer allow new posts and comments from the end of January 2024. Saved articles can be read until the end of February 2024 before Artifact is shut down completely.
The eight-person team working on Artifact will disband and pursue other opportunities, the blog post said.
The author says:
Artifact’s short existence shows how difficult it is to help an AI-centered messaging app take off, even with its high-profile founding team. The standalone curation approach wasn’t enough to draw users away from established news apps. While AI promises new possibilities, the fundamental challenge is to deliver a product that actually gets users to use the service.