Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Time Magazine
You may not be surprised by this Time The magazine has chosen to highlight the AI industry in its annual “Person of the Year” issue. Or should we say individuals: the collective billionaire “architects of AI”, it was announced.
But what may surprise you is a new feature featured prominently TimeWebsite: A Window to AI Chatbots.
It reads, “Ask me anything.”
It doesn’t go away. Instead, the chatbot window remains stationary at the bottom center of your screen, blocking any text in the way. In fact, depending on the size and resolution of your device’s screen, it completely erases special home page titles – 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, there’s no other means of removing it. If you click on a text box, it expands to fill the entire page. Call it an ironic metaphor if you want for the tech and AI industry taking over news and media. This is also absolutely annoying.
Emily M. Bender is a computational linguistics expert at the University of Washington and author of the book “The AI Con.” Complained About intrusive AI features on social media.
“Any journalism organization that values the work of its journalists will offer it to them as papier-mâché,” Bender said of an AI chatbot, “and certainly not let that offering get in the way of another piece of journalism that their audience might be trying to read.”
Time Unveiled AI in late November, though apparently without much fanfare. It’s not just an AI chatbot, it insists, but an A.I. Representative — meaning it’s considered autonomous — and trained on the magazine’s 102-year-old archive of approximately 750,000 magazine issues, Web articles and other assets, producing summaries, audio rundowns and answers to user questions. It was created in partnership with Scale AI, a controversial data annotation company whose services are essential to the generative AI industry.
“People spend hours with agents, and hopefully that means they’ll spend a lot more time with our journalism,” Time Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs told axios After its unveiling.
The “TimeAI” agent was not featured on the magazine’s homepage at launch, which is probably why it has remained under the radar until now. However, it is not so TimeThis is the first step towards experimentation with AI.
When it crowned Donald Trump as Person of the Year in 2024, Time used declaration for unveiling Looking back, this appears to be a prototype of the AI we are presented with today, also built with scale AI. A sign of progress, or at least a change in industry trends? It simply called its predecessor an AI chatbot, not an “agent”. It is not yet clear how new AI should be considered agentic.
Definitely Time Newsrooms aren’t the only one taking up AI. like the outlet Washington Post And bloomberg There is some form of AI that provides summaries of articles or answers questions, though neither of these are that intrusive Time‘S. new York Times Uses it to generate headlines, WaPo Particularly obsessed with AI: It is considering using AI to help non-professionals write entire articles that can be published in the newspaper, and is now launching an AI-generated podcast service.
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