It may not surprise you that Time magazine has elected to highlight the AI industry in its annual “Person of the Year” issue. Or should we say persons: the collective billionaire “architects of AI,” it announced.
But what may surprise you is a new feature prominently displayed on Time‘s website: a window for an AI chatbot.
“Ask me anything,” it reads.
It does not go away. Instead, the chatbot window stays fixed to the bottom center of your screen, blocking any text that’s in the way. In fact, depending on the size and resolution of your device’s screen, it completely blots out the home page’s featured headline — including today’s much-discussed article, “Person of the Year 2025: The Architects of AI.”
There’s no x-button to close the AI window, and as far as we can tell, no other means of swatting it away. If you click in the text box, it expands to filling the entire page. Call it an ironic metaphor for the tech and AI’s industry capturing of news and media, if you want. It’s also just plain annoying.
Emily M. Bender, a computational linguistics expert at the University of Washington and author of the book “The AI Con,” complained about the intrusive AI feature on social media.
“Any journalistic outfit that values the work of their journalists would offer to present it as papier-mâché,” Bender said of the AI chatbot, “and certainly wouldn’t put that offer in the way of the other bit of journalism their audience might be trying to read.”
Time unveiled the AI in late November, though apparently without much fanfare. It’s not merely an AI chatbot, it insists, but an AI agent — meaning it’s supposed to be autonomous — and trained on the magazine’s 102-year-old archive of nearly 750,000 magazine issues, web articles, and other assets, generating summaries, audio rundowns, and answers to user questions. It was built in partnership with Scale AI, a controversial data annotation company whose services are essential to the generative AI industry.
“People spend hours and hours with agents, and hopefully this means that they will spend a lot more time with our journalism,” Time editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs told Axios after its unveiling.
The “TimeAI” agent wasn’t featured on the magazine’s homepage at launch, which is perhaps why it flew under the radar until now. This, however, is not Time‘s first stab at experimenting with AI.
When it crowned Donald Trump as Person of the Year in 2024, Time used the announcement to unveil what in retrospect seems a prototype of the AI we’re presented with today, also built with Scale AI. One sign of progress, or at least shifting industry trends? It merely called its predecessor an AI chatbot, and not an “agent.” It’s not yet clear how the new AI is supposed to be agentic.
Certainly Time isn’t the only newsroom picking up AI. Outlets like The Washington Post and Bloomberg have some form of AI that provides a summary of articles or answers questions, though neither are as intrusive as Time‘s. The New York Times uses it to generate headlines. WaPo is particularly AI obsessed: it’s considered using an AI to help non-professional write entire articles that could be published in the paper, and is now launching an AI-generated podcast service.
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