Instagram Founders’ Artifact News App Adds AI-Generated Images, Gets More Confusing

There’s always room for more artificial intelligence in your news feed—at least according to Artifact. The news app developed by former Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger is now rolling out AI-generated images for posts on the platform.

Artifact now allows users to generate and upload AI-generated images for their own content that’s posted on the platform. They will need to navigate to the generator tool while composing their own post and submit a prompt. The app’s artificial intelligence will then generate an image from the input in just a few minutes. The image generator will also follow certain aesthetic prompts, like “3D” or “digital painting”, as well as mimic styles like pop art.

“We’ve heard that choosing a cover image can be hard, and we know a great visual can make the difference in catching someone’s eye and telling a great story,” the company wrote in a press release emailed to Gizmodo. “This tool makes it easy to create beautiful images just by describing what you want in a few words.”

Artifact unveiled a “Posts” feature last week, which allowed users to begin publishing their own content to the platform on the newly released Links tab which focuses on user-generated content. The new infrastructure moves Artifact away from the news feed it was originally touting and more towards Twitter/X territory, with users’ posts being disseminated to a wider audience. The company wrote that posts will mainly be siloed to the posters’ followers and those on the platform who have read up on similar topics.

Related: Instagram Founders’ News App Artifact Adds ‘Reputation Scores’ and Comments

Systrom and Krieger’s plan was always to evolve the app to include social networking elements like Links and Posts, according to TechCrunch, but the new image generator and user content streams take Artifact even further from the Apple News competitor that it was originally released as earlier this year.

Artifact debuted to the public in February after being released as invite-only in January, with its artificial intelligence recommendation engine which learns about your reading habits as you dive into the news touted as its pièce de résistance. While users could hide publishers and program the app to cater to their preferences, Systrom told Gizmodo in February that the algorithm was “fuzzy enough” to keep showing users “exploration content.” Since then, Artifact swears it’s going to use AI for good, like rewriting clickbait headlines shared on the platform and using Snoop Dogg’s voice to read you the news.

As Elon Musk’s X/Twitter treads water and attracts countless copycats, it seems that Artifact is thinking beyond news aggregation and wants to be the new place where people shitpost about current events while spreading fake images.