It's fairly likely that every life-form that currently exists in this planet has a common ancestor that self-assembled billions of years ago. Your genetic code is the result of a huge amount of cycles of copies (and mutations) of that common ancestor's DNA.

The life form that Venter created is separate from that lineage - its genetic code was synthesized from basic building blocks, not copied from an ancestor (at least in a biochemical sense; the information content was indeed copied, but that's another hurdle).

Whether or not this makes it "artificial life" depends on your definition of "life", and there's a surprising amount of controversy there.

I think it's pretty accurate. There was only information to begin with, and now there is life. It happens that information was gained from a pre-existing cell, but this new cell has nothing to do with the cell it's derived from, it's made completely by the work of humans. That has never happened before.

Edit: However, I know what you mean about it not being 100% artificial, as in completely designed by humans: Maybe "synthetic life" is better?

Further edit: More than using a pre-existing genome, what makes it not completely artificial is that they had to put their DNA into another cell, basically cloning using synthesized DNA rather than natural DNA.

I don't know about that, to date genetic engineering consisted of taking DNA from one organism, isolating a desired trait from another organism and using a gun or splicer to "inject" that code into preexisting DNA. These guys scaffold the DNA from the basic building blocks. There is a huge difference. Personally to me they are both artificial life as neither occurred via random selection, it is just one used a current organisms DNA as the building block, while the other used the bare elements to put together all of the DNA. The value of the second approach is that you don't get all of the junk that comes with harvested DNA you only get what you specify.

Consider natural and artificial vanilla flavoring; it's more technical usage than misleading.

(Natural vanilla is harvested from beans, resulting in vanillin, etc. Artificial vanilla is synthesized from e.g., bacteria, and in specific cases molecular synthesis.)

What about diamonds made in a laboratory? They're still more or less the same thing as a natural diamond, but they're still called artificial.

Though it is a bit overblown, but you know, science journalism.

I agree. They wrote a new OS and uploaded it into existing hardware.

Still a great feat, but not quite 100% "artificial life" yet.

I agree that disappointment in this accomplishment is crazy, it's an amazing feat

That said, people can sometimes go batty and start thinking something was achieved when it wasn't. I think it's reasonable to clarify that this isn't a full realization of "artificial life" just yet (though it clearly is a partial realization, as the scientists did alter the genome (also, apparantly they removed potentially disease-inducing strands of DNA, according to the NYTimes). The poster who got negged expressed this distinction in a fairly dismissive fashion that appeared to disparage the achievement. But you should be able to point out (diplomatically, one would hope)that a monumental achievement isn't an even more monumental achievement without being accused of minimizing the achievement itself!