Time Magazine Skewered Over ‘Person of the Year’ Reveal

Screenshot via Time Twitter

Time magazine put the “Architects of AI,” including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, on the cover of their annual Person of the Year issue, and the internet was quick to roast the reveal.

“2025 was the year when artificial intelligence’s full potential roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back,” Time announced. “For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year.”

The cover images include tech moguls sitting on a beam, referencing the famous 1932 staged picture of iron workers sitting and eating lunch on a steel beam above Manhattan.

Time was quickly roasted for both the quality of the new cover images and celebrating AI, something critics argued could potentially threaten the jobs of the very people behind the list.

“Besides the terrible pick for Person of the Year, can we just address how bad the cover images are? If you’re going to have ‘architects,’ why not have an architectural rendering of ‘AI’ versus scaffolding? And the lunch on a beam picture is even worse. Derivative, badly done,” tech analyst James Wester wrote on X.

“Non-zero chance that we look back on this TIME ‘person’ of the year the same way we think about the 1938 and 1942 issues,” BBC’s Alex Foster wrote.

Time’s 1938 “Person of the Year” was Adolf Hitler. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was then “Person of the Year” in 1942.

MAGA voices were also upset that late conservative activist Charlie Kirk was not given the title this year following his assassination.

Time’s deep-dive into AI mentions concerns about deepfakes and outpacing human labor, but also noted the technology has been rapidly integrating into businesses during President Donald Trump’s second term in office.

“Researchers have found that AIs can scheme, deceive, or blackmail,” the story reads. “As the leading companies’ models improve, AI systems may eventually outcompete humans—as if an advanced species were on the cusp of colonizing the earth.”

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