Yahoo News gets an AI-powered overhaul

The Yahoo News app is now AI-assisted, thanks to the company’s purchase of Artifact. Yahoo rolled out an update to its news aggregation app on Thursday with AI-powered personal feeds, key takeaways and the ability to flag clickbait headlines.

In April, Yahoo (Engadget’s parent company) bought the remains of Artifact, the AI-fueled news and recommendation app from Instagram’s co-founders that shut down earlier this year. Today’s update showcases how the technology can improve Yahoo’s news feed, which brings in over 180 million unique visitors every month in the US.

The new Yahoo News, available now on mobile and later on desktop, starts by letting you pick topics and publishers of interest for its algorithms to customize your feed accordingly. One noteworthy feature is the ability to quickly glance at the “Key Takeaways” of a given story: a short bullet list of main ideas that (if you request it) appear at the top of an article to help save time. This is Yahoo’s version of Artifact’s “Summarize” feature.

You can further customize your feed by blocking keywords you want to avoid (like, say, “NFT”) or publishers whose content you don’t like. Maybe the most intriguing feature is its ability to flag clickbait, which prompts the AI to rewrite headlines that are misleading, overly sensational or withholding critical information in hopes that you’ll click. (Yes, please.)

In addition to the app, Yahoo is revamping its homepage layout. The updated UI “emphasizes top news, personalized recommendations, and real-time trending topics” and is designed to evolve over time. The company says you can opt in to receive access to new features (presumably, many AI-powered) as they’re introduced.

If you’re in the US, you can download the new Yahoo News app for iOS or Android today.