Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel tore into Time magazine’s 2025 Person of the Year cover featuring the “Architects of AI,” referring to the eight-person lineup of tech CEOs as “the eight dorks of the apocalypse.”
Kimmel kicked off Thursday’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” with a dramatic reveal of Time’s Person of the Year, slamming the outlet for not only its choice of winners, but also the cover’s overall design, which he said looked like “Photoshop from 2007.”
The cover features 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.
“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,” Kimmel revealed to his audience, which booed in response.
The late-night host quipped that he was “expecting more enthusiasm” from the crowd before continuing to blast the “Architects of AI.”
“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?” he questioned.
A common concern among critics of artificial intelligence (AI) is that the technology will eventually take over humans’ jobs.
Kimmel leaned into that idea, noting the irony of “the people who replaced people” winning this year’s Person of the Year award.
Shifting his focus to the cover art, Kimmel told the show’s producers to “put that cover back up for a second” so he could get back to roasting it.
“I want to say, ironically, with as much as you can do with AI graphically, it looks like Photoshop from 2007,” he snarked.
According to Time, the work by digital painter Jason Seiler is “an homage to the famous 1932 photograph of construction workers on a steel beam 800 feet above the RCA building in New York City.”
AI and its various applications have been taking the world by storm, with many predicting significant changes on the horizon as the technology progresses and permeates society.
“Thanks to Huang, [SoftBank’s Masayoshi] Son, Altman, and other AI titans, humanity is now flying down the highway, all gas no brakes, toward a highly automated and highly uncertain future,” Time wrote.
Last year, the outlet named President-elect Donald Trump its 2024 Person of the Year.
