Yahoo News is bigger than you’d think — and it’s getting a big dose of AI.
    • TubeTalkerX
      44•3 months ago

      Yup. Everytime I need to test an internet connection I go to Yahoo cause I know the User wasn’t there so no cache version.

    • kirklennon
      9•3 months ago

      Yahoo Inc. owns TechCrunch, Autoblog, and Engadget, plus some other stuff, along with their own Yahoo-branded stuff (excluding Yahoo Japan, which is a totally separate company). It’s a ton of eyeballs, and they sell the ads on their sites.

    • Admiral PatrickEnglish
      9•3 months ago

      I don’t know how they’re structured / what they really do as a company now, but they do still seem to have a well-regarded news division (or, they at least aggregate quality content).

      Well, they used to until I read this. Once they throw this AI nonsense into it, I’m bailing.

    • @misk@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      11•3 months ago

      It’s not all bad. Artifact uses “AI” to change clickbait titles into more descriptive ones for example.

      • Admiral PatrickEnglish
        23•3 months ago

        Still a slippery-slope, IMO.

        When something (news) is, by nature, designed to inform you of the current state of reality, introducing any process that hallucinates (read: makes shit up) should not be anywhere near them.

        People are free to use LLM plugins to “de-clickbait” headlines as they want, but keep that out of the news process itself.

        Just my 2 cents on it.

      • GhostalmediaEnglish
        4•3 months ago

        I tried artifact for a bit, and the blog spam was so bad. Stuff would get promoted that would’ve never made it out of new on Reddit or Lemmy

        • @misk@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          2•3 months ago

          Yeah, little control over presented articles was what led me to drop it when I was considering reddit alternatives but I’d kill for that de-clickbaiting feature to make way to RSS readers and link aggregators.

          • GhostalmediaEnglish
            2•3 months ago

            The amount of Yanko Design spam in my feed was driving me nuts.

      • SneezycatEnglish
        3•3 months ago

        If people use clickbaity titles in the first place it’s cause they work, not because they don’t know how to write informative ones…

        Edit: my bad, didn’t know what Artifact was…

      • @clearedtoland@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1•3 months ago

        Yeah. There are definitely some novel uses and dev efforts. I’m terrified of the day AI data and user interaction data gets monetized though.

    • @woelkchen@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1•3 months ago

      My mom likes the Yahoo Weather app on her iPad and that displays subtle ads.

      Also Yahoo owns web sites like Engadget which run Yahoo’s ads services.

  • GhostalmediaEnglish
    6•3 months ago

    So a failing company is buying a failed new aggregator? How does Yahoo benefit from this?

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    2•3 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The two sides declined to share the cost of the acquisition, but both made clear Yahoo is acquiring Artifact’s tech rather than its team.

    Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, Artifact’s co-founders, will be “special advisors” for Yahoo but won’t be joining the company.

    “We have built something that a core group of users love,” the co-founders wrote in January, “but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way.” They said that the biggest reason to shut down was in order to focus on “newer, bigger and better things that have the ability to reach many millions of people.” The bet behind Artifact was always that AI had the potential to be a huge, internet-changing technology; maybe there were just more interesting things to work on than a news app without a big news audience.

    “A lot of organizations care deeply about news and personalized content,” he says, “and I think they’re looking around and saying ‘Wow, there’s this new wave of AI… maybe we should figure out what’s going on.’ Maybe that’s what I discounted originally.”

    The company first began exploring an Artifact acquisition after reading that shutdown letter, says Kat Downs Mulder, the general manager for Yahoo News.

    Downs Mulder says more than 180 million people come to Yahoo News every month, which puts Artifact’s personalization and recommendation tech in front of a vastly larger set of users than it likely ever would have gotten on its own.

    The original article contains 832 words, the summary contains 247 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • OptionalEnglish
    1•3 months ago

    Hey is that lady still there at - Ah, no she left in 2017 after selling yahoo to verizon for almost 5 billion.

    Crazypants.