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Nothing says “person of the year” like replacing Depression-era workers with the billionaires making our skills obsolete.
From left to right: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta; Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices; Elon Musk, xAI; Jensen Huang, President and CEO of Nvidia; Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI; Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies; Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic; Fei-Fei Li, Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute and CEO of World Labs. (cover by Jason Seiler; courtesy of TIME/TIME Person of the Year)
TIME Magazine announced that its 2025 Person of the Year is the collective “Architects of AI.” But Chicago-based illustrator Jason Seiler’s representation of a handful of those honored for the magazine cover has generated more ire than the selection itself. While none of us are happy to see Elon Musk’s face associated with the award for the second time, many are taking aim at Seiler’s reimagining of one of the most famous historical photographs in the world.
“Lunch Atop a Skyscraper,” taken in 1932 by an unknown artist, depicts 11 construction workers seated along a steel beam, part of the skeletal framework of what we now know as 30 Rockefeller Plaza, suspended some 850 feet (~259m) in the air as Manhattan’s architecture sprawls out behind them. In his cover illustration, Seiler replaces the rugged, tough crew with the likes of a weirdly purple Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, and Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices among other key figures credited with today’s AI boom.
Unknown maker, “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” (1932), distributed by Acme Newspictures (public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
The tech oligarchs, decked out in sports jackets and cardigans with laptops and iPhones at the ready, look self-important in their superimposed positions along the beam, talking past each other or interacting with nobody in particular while suspended over the cityscape. Regardless of how each of them got their beginnings, these “Architects of AI” are as far removed as one can be from the grease, metal, and casually life-threatening labor depicted in the original photo — rather, they reap disproportionate benefits from the contemporary equivalent of said exploitation.
All responses to TIME‘s Person of the Year announcement on X. (screenshot Rhea Nayyar/Hyperallergic)
In the original, we get an idealized glimpse into the life and labor of the city’s historically immigrant-heavy, under-valued workforce as they create a world far above our heads with skillsets far beyond our reach.
Today, we’re looking at CEOs and other inflated, out-of-touch executives who have overreached into every aspect of our world to create something that makes our own basic to hard-earned skills nearly obsolete.
Netizens across the world have expressed their disgust with the cover, denigrating it as ragebait, a mockery of the “most iconic blue-collar image of all time,” and a “puff piece about the rich people destroying our world.” Many also argue that TIME and Seiler only ingratiate the figureheads who already take all the credit for the AI boom rather than the engineers, scientists, researchers, and other actual “AI architects” responsible for developing the rapidly evolving technology.
Comments from TIME‘s Instagram post featuring the cover (screenshot Rhea Nayyar/Hyperallergic)
TIME’s Person of the Year designation has never been about highlighting morality. Per the magazine’s own description, it’s about identifying the person, entity, or group that “for better or for worse … has done the most to influence the events of the year.”
To my own dismay, I concede to the reality that the featured “Architects of AI” have influenced my life in one way or another. I still use X, I’m completely dependent on Google Maps, I’ve had to break out ChatGPT on a couple of occasions to find specific articles from before 2016, and I even rode the Dall E and Midjourney merry-go-rounds when the generative image models became accessible to the public.
With and without our consent, our digital existence has inextricably become fodder for machine learning, so much so that it’s punitive to opt out if you even have the option to.
To that degree, are we not the unwilling Architects of AI as well? We’ve inadvertently and thanklessly developed this new world derived entirely from our scholarship and inventions, our imaginations and creative output, our relationships and personal discoveries, our physical labor, our histories and archives, our digital lives and interactions, and so on.
TIME may have already made all of us the Person of the Year in 2006 during the surge of accessible digital presence, but it’s not like the publication isn’t above recycling.
I can at least give the magazine credit for commissioning an actual illustrator for the cover, and he succeeded in generating a lot of publicity with his design choices. At the end of the day, even “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” was a curated image deployed as a publicity stunt for Rockefeller Center, commissioned by a dynasty built on the backs of workers.
