Time magazine has announced its 2025 Person of the Year — and critics aren’t having it.“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 magazine wrote Thursday morning on X, formerly Twitter.Time released two covers for the issue, with one showing the letters “AI” being constructed amid scaffolding and another revamping the classic 1932 photo “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” — with the world’s leading tech titans replacing the original’s steel workers.The featured “architects” include X owner Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, AMD’s Lisa Su, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li and CEO of Google’s DeepMind division Demis Hassabis.The selection of wealthy tech leaders sparked rather grim reactions on social media, as the rise of artificial intelligence has caused widespread concern about the technology replacing actual people in various industries and its negative impact on the environment.“Very cool to work toward the blurring of distinctions between AI and persons. What could go wrong?” wrote one user on X, with another person commenting: “The moment ‘Person of the Year’ goes to people building non-people… yeah, a new era officially started.”While the latest selection might portend that “non-people” are starting to gain mainstream prominence as the one X user suggested, Time previously named the personal computer its “Machine of the Year” in 1982 and named the Earth its “Planet of the Year” title in 1988.Others noted that the Person of the Year title was previously given to universally detestable figures such as Adolf Hitler, and that the 1938 issue in question wasn’t an endorsement of the Nazi dictator — but merely an acknowledgement of his global impact.Left to right: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Sam Altman were among the AI "architects" Time selected.David Zalubowski/Associated Press; Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press; Markus Schreiber/Associated PressTime was nonetheless brutally roasted on X for both the quality of the cover images and for what many view as public approval of a technology that could threaten the magazine’s own employees. Tech analyst James Wester was particularly frustrated with the effort.He wrote, “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.”Wester concluded, “Derivative, badly done.”Others were veritably shocked that Time didn’t name late conservative activist Charlie Kirk as its Person of the Year, as his fatal shooting in September sparked public discussion surrounding free speech, political violence and censorship on social media.Time’s big reveal notably landed on the same day that OpenAI was sued for wrongful death by the heirs of an elderly Connecticut woman who allege the company’s flagship service ChatGPT nurtured her son’s “paranoid delusions” before he fatally strangled her.While the title has never been an endorsement, critics on social media held nothing back.You’ve got a whole track record of boosting the worst people… Hitler, Stalin, Trump, and now these clowns on a beam. Terrible— Abier (@abierkhatib) December 11, 2025 You named the “AI architect” as Person of the Year, yet the cover shows CEOs instead of the real creators… The engineers and researchers who actually build AI. If anyone deserved that title, it was AI itself or the people behind it, not a marketing-friendly cast.— Stefano R.L. (@Tytanni4l) December 11, 2025 Way to just abandoned the whole concept of “person “of the year.— kEllisFH (@kellisfh) December 11, 2025 Close