Instagram co-founders launch Artifact, a text-based version of TikTok

Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have launched ‘Artifact’, a text-based version of TikTok which will use machine learning to understand users’ interests.

Artifact is a personalised news feed application, whose name represents the combination of articles, facts and artificial intelligence (AI), reports The Verge.

The application opened up its waiting list to the public on Tuesday, and is available for both Android and iOS devices.

The application opens to a feed of popular articles selected from a curated range of publications, including top news outlets to small-scale blogs about niche topics.

After users tap on articles that interest them, the application will show them similar posts and stories in the future, in the same way watching videos on TikTok’s For You page tunes its algorithm over time.

The application’s beta users are currently testing two more features that Systrom hopes to become the main pillars of the app.

One of them is a feed that will display posts made by users you have picked to follow along with their comments.

The second feature is a direct message inbox that will allow users to discuss the posts they read privately with friends.

“Throughout the years, what I saw was that every time we use machine learning to improve the consumer experience, things got really good really quickly,” Systrom said in a statement.

He also mentioned that specific posts that spread falsehoods will also be deleted by Artifact. Additionally, the application’s machine-learning algorithms will be primarily focused on measuring how much time users spent reading about various topics, the report said.

In 2012, Facebook had acquired Instagram for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock and later in 2018, Systrom and Krieger resigned from Facebook.