Artifact
Artifact, the best news app you never even knew about.
This app, powered by “AI” is the best news app I’ve ever come across. The more you use it, the more it learns about what you like and dislike, and fronts news to you accordingly. There are options to directly tell the app what interests you (and what doesn’t), but I find the algorithm does a pretty good job after just a week or so of daily usage. I would say that in thew few months I’ve been using it, over 95% of the articles have been relevant to me. This is in stark contrast to some of the garbage that Google and Apple’s news apps have delivered to me on a regular basis.
Developed by the two originators of Instagram (the good original Instagram, not the ad-laden Meta-owned mess it is today), Artifact has a clean design with the article source clearly shown, along with age of the article, the number of reads it has had within the app, and any comments it’s received. Yes, that’s right, comments. Anyone can comment on the article directly within the app, and while these comments aren’t seen outside of Artifact, there’s a vibrant and well-informed community providing these comments. You can even reply to individual comments. Think of it like Twitter or Threads per news article.
Another ground-breaking feature is Mark As Clickbait. If you see a clickbaity title, you can mark it as such and the AI will then change it to something appropriate and informative. If enough Artifact users also mark it as clickbait, then the app will just show the refined article title to everyone in the app. Obviously it doesn’t change the title in the original article, but you’re not going directly to the source anyway. It’s truly an innovative feature.
Another feature, although not so innovative, is the best implementation I’ve seen so far, Reader View. This will take the article and strip out all the annoying ads, pop-ups, autoplaying videos (my pet hate) and deliver you a clean, well-formatted article. It’s just so perfectly exectuted. If you don’t want to read the article, you can have it read to you using a number of different AI-generated voices. These range from Snoop Dog to Gwynneth Paltrow as the official voices, to excellent simulations of Barack Obama or Dwight from The Office. There are also a number of accents including US, UK, Australia, Nigeria and South Africa, with a multiple variations of each. And if you’re too lazy to even have it read to you, you can hit a sparkly button that summarises the article into a couple of succinct sentences.
Artifact is truly an amazing app that is updated regularly with new features that are relevant and welcome.
