Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel tore into Time magazine for its AI-centric Person of the Year cover, which featured eight figures dubbed the “Architects of AI.” Kimmel kicked off his Thursday night episode with the reveal and immediately criticized the magazine for the feature.
Jimmy Kimmel comments on Time’s AI-centric person of the year
Jimmy Kimmel opened his Thursday night episode by revealing Time’s Person of the Year. This year, Time magazine selected an eight-person lineup of tech leaders that it referred to as the “Architects of AI.” Kimmel mocked the group, calling them “the eight dorks of the apocalypse.”
The magazine cover featured Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, xAI’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, AMD’s Lisa Su, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Fei-Fei Li of Stanford and World Labs.
Kimmel criticized the selection on-air. “Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and five other off-kilter tech sisters and bros, the architects of AI, are the Person of the Year,” he said, prompting boos from the audience.
The talk show host continued, “They call them architects. And I wonder, is it customary for an architect to have no idea how a building they’ve designed works or whether or not it will one day rise up to try to kill them?”
Kimmel also addressed broader concerns surrounding artificial intelligence, including fears about its potential impact on human jobs and society. He pointed out what he viewed as irony in honoring figures whose technology could replace people.
Additionally, Kimmel aimed the magazine’s cover artwork, which was created by digital painter Jason Seiler. Time described the image as “an homage to the famous 1932 photograph of construction workers on a steel beam 800 feet above the RCA building in New York City.” Kimmel responded to it. He said, “I want to say, ironically, with as much as you can do with AI graphically, it looks like Photoshop from 2007.”
This comes one year after Time named President Donald Trump as its Person of the Year.
Originally reported by Sourav Chakraborty on Mandatory.
