Time magazine named the "Architects of AI" as Person of the Year 2025, receiving backlash for promoting the tech leaders.
On Thursday, December 11, the renowned magazine highlighted the notable impact of artificial intelligence on different areas of society, including politics, the workplace, and media.
The magazine dropped two covers for its 2025 Person of the Year: one of an illustration reading the word "AI" and the other was a painting of tech leaders inspired by the famous 1932 photo titled Lunch atop a Skyscraper.
Painted by Jason Seiler, the second cover featured Lisa Su, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, Fei-Fei Li and Mark Zuckerberg.
Following the announcement of the highly anticipated title, social media erupted as users rejected the notion that AI and tech leaders had been the year's most influential voices.
Many netizens called out Time for "ruining" the original photograph taken on September 20, 1932, of eleven ironworkers sitting on a steel beam of the RCA building, 850 feet above the ground during construction in NYC.
As one user penned on X, "Noting says 2025 better than recreating an iconic image of actual workers but replacing them with some millionaires who've never worked for anything in their lives and whose supposed inventions gonna destroy art and the environment."
"Time magazine genuinely seems to have the worst concept for person of the year and feels like it is genuinely trying get controversy like it is clinging on to dear life," another critic noted.
A third chimed in, "we are so cooked as a society"
One X post read, "The concept of the photo of those blue collar workers one slip from death being replaced by tech billionaires who do nothing but destroy our planet."
Last year the title was received by the US President Donald Trump after the presidential election.
