artifact

Etymology

Alteration of artefact, from Italian artefatto, from Latin arte (“by skill”) (ablative of ars (“art”)) + factum (“thing made”) (from facio (“to make, do”)).

noun

1. An object made or shaped by human hand or labor.
   Given increasing investment in an IT (information technology) artifact (i.e., online service website), it is becoming important to retain existing customers. May 2010, Young Sik Kang, Heeseok Lee, “Understanding the role of an IT artifact in online service continuance: An extended perspective of user satisfaction.(Report)”, in Computers in Human Behavior, →DOI
2. An object made or shaped by some agent or intelligence, not necessarily of direct human origin.
3. Something viewed as a product of human agency or conception rather than an inherent element.
   The very act of looking at a naked model was an artifact of male supremacy. 2004, Philip Weiss, American Taboo: A Murder In The Peace Corps
   Overall the signage at NIE has the appearance being a top-down artefact driven by institutional policy with English set as the default language. 2019, Li Huang, James Lambert, “Another Arrow for the Quiver: A New Methodology for Multilingual Researchers”, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, →DOI, page 6
4. A finding or structure in an experiment or investigation that is not a true feature of the object under observation, but is a result of external action, the test arrangement, or an experimental error.
   The spot on his lung turned out to be an artifact of the X-ray process.
5. (archaeology) An object, such as a tool, ornament, or weapon of archaeological or historical interest, especially such an object found at an archaeological excavation.
   The dig produced many Roman artifacts.
6. (biology) An appearance or structure in protoplasm due to death, the method of preparation of specimens, or the use of reagents, and not present during life.
7. (computing) A perceptible distortion that appears in an audio or video file or a digital image as a result of applying a lossy compression or other inexact processing algorithm.
   This JPEG image has been so highly compressed that it has unsightly artifacts, making it unsuitable for the cover of our magazine.
   These hallucinations are compression artifacts, but—like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier—they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world. 2023-02-09, Ted Chiang, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web”, in The New Yorker
8. (museology) Any object in the collection of a museum. May be used sensu stricto only for human-made objects, or may include ones that are not human-made.