Jimmy Kimmel ripped into Time Magazine’s AI-focused “Person of the Year” cover, which he said looked like “photoshop from 2007.”
The comedian addressed the controversial cover during Thursday evening’s monologue for “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” where he voiced criticism for Time after the outlet bestowed the “Architects of AI” —including Mark Zuckerberg, Lisa Su, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei and Fei-Fei Li— with the annual honor.
“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 shared with his studio audience, who booed in response to the reveal.
“I was expecting more enthusiasm,” the late night host quipped. “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?”
As Kimmel went on, he joked that Musk and company started with the “whole AI business” because they “wanted a robot to have sex with and to tell them they’re cool,” slamming the group as “the eight dorks of the apocalypse.”
Kimmel didn’t stop there, as he also roasted the overall design of the cover.
“Put that cover back up for a second,” he noted. “I want to say, ironically, with as much as you can do with AI graphically, it looks like photoshop from 2007.”
Time Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs explained the thinking behind the cover on “TODAY” Thursday morning.
“This is the year we feel like the people who were designing, imagining and building artificial intelligence stopped debating about how to create this technology and started racing to deploy it,”Jacobs said,”and there are enormous consequences for society.”
He added: “This reminds me of the Gilded Age … I think never before since then has so much power been concentrated in so few individuals, and we know what happened then — amazing progress, but also incredible inequality.”
Watch Kimmel’s full monologue above.
“Jimmy Kimmel Live” airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. ET on ABC.
