To create this year’s TIME100 AI cover, artist Refik Anadol, who is included on this year’s list, trained his studio’s AI system on an archive containing each of TIME’s more than 5,000 covers to date, spanning over 100 years. The resulting abstract visualization—featuring Anadol’s signature flowing, molecular aesthetic—represents the AI “dreaming” about a century of TIME’s visual history, he says.
Dubbed the Large Nature Model by internationally renowned Turkish-American media artist Anadol and his team, his modular multimodal AI system is the product of extensive research and collaboration. According to Anadol’s studio, the model was trained on “the most extensive, ethically collected dataset of the natural world,” combining over half a billion images from the archives of organizations including the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution, and London’s Natural History Museum with data collected directly from 16 rainforests. Anadol, whose work has been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, London’s Serpentine Galleries, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao also worked with tech giants Nvidia and Google Cloud, which provided computing resources, while models such as Meta’s Llama and Google’s Gemini play a range of roles under the hood.
The model deconstructed each TIME cover, extracting data on thematic and historic context, and using this data as a prompt. Anadol explains they ran the system in two modes: “future cover” and “archive dream.” For the first, the goal was to use “the patterns of the past hundred years to generate pathways to hopeful futures,” imagining hypothetical covers starring unborn heroes who might one day use AI to fix historic problems. Others feature those people performing jobs that don’t yet exist—like a “symbiotic architect, who designs buildings that are integrated living ecosystems,” or a “chief memory curator, responsible for archiving our digital and physical past.” As Anadol puts it, “Can we use AI to dream new jobs? Can we use AI to find solutions to problems we created?”
While these imagined futures informed the project’s conceptual framework, the final cover emerged from the second mode—”archive dream”—which represents a synthesis of TIME’s archive, filtered through his sensibilities. The core image was AI-generated, while the cover’s details—like its text, gallery context, and Anadol’s silhouette, included for a sense of scale—were human-directed: “true human-machine collaboration,” he says. Online, the cover can be viewed as a seamless looping video.
While the work is reminiscent of his successful 2022 exhibition, “Unsupervised,” at MoMA, which attracted nearly three million people, Anadol explains the conceptual and technical underpinning of each project are fundamentally different, each representing a different path for machine-driven creativity. For MoMA, the goal was to have the system develop its own aesthetic logic. With TIME, Anadol wanted his naturalist system to be responsive to human history. “Ultimately, this project is an invitation. The future is not a fixed destination to be afraid of, but a fluid reality we can actually shape,” he says.
In 2023, “Unsupervised” became the first artwork tokenized on blockchain to be added to MoMA’s permanent collection. The moment represented an institutional invitation into the artistic canon. He sees his feature on TIME’s cover—an “iconic canvas”—as another such moment. In a way, he says, “the TIME cover can be another museum.”
See the full TIME100 AI list here.
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