Yahoo brings Artifact back from the dead inside its new AI news app

Artifact is officially back from the dead, just wearing a very different coat of paint.

After buying the tech behind Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger’s failed news app back in April, Yahoo just rolled out a completely rebuilt Yahoo News app for iOS and Android powered by Artifact’s engine.

Artifact’s best tricks inside Yahoo News

Artifact originally set out to be a kind of TikTok for text before losing its way in an awkward pivot toward social networking. While the company eventually gave up, the recommendation algorithms and AI reading tools it built were genuinely great.

Yahoo kept the good parts. The new mobile app features an AI-driven personalized news feed that learns what you like to read. If you are strapped for time, a feature called Key Takeaways generates quick bullet summaries of articles.

Fans of Artifact will also be thrilled to see its best anti-clickbait tool survive. If you run across an obnoxious headline, you can flag it, and the AI will rewrite it into something straightforward and honest on the spot.

You can also block specific keywords and mute publishers you never want to see. Yahoo skipped most of Artifact’s messy social features, though you can still share article snippets with friends, collect reader badges, and keep reading streaks going.

Yahoo is also bringing these ideas to desktop. An opt-in redesign of the Yahoo News homepage is rolling out today with top stories, personalized picks, and trending sections.

Why it matters

For readers who missed Artifact when it shut down, downloading the new Yahoo News is an easy win. It gives you some of the best text curation and AI summary tools on mobile without having to pay a dime, and the ability to filter out junk media and rewrite trashy headlines makes daily browsing much less annoying.

From a business perspective, Yahoo’s play was remarkably smart. Legacy web portals usually struggle to build sleek, modern mobile products from scratch. Instead of spending years reinventing the wheel, Yahoo picked up an elite Silicon Valley news engine on a fire sale and instantly upgraded its news experience.

The real question is whether the Yahoo brand can convince anyone outside its existing audience to care. Artifact failed because dedicated text-news aggregation is a brutally tough business to monetize and grow. Yahoo gives the underlying tech a massive safety net, but whether everyday users actually want a standalone Yahoo news app on their home screen in 2024 remains an uphill battle.