{"id":7351,"date":"2025-12-11T19:08:06","date_gmt":"2025-12-11T19:08:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/time-magazine-ai-chatbot\/"},"modified":"2025-12-11T19:08:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T19:08:06","slug":"time-magazine-ai-chatbot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/time-magazine-ai-chatbot\/","title":{"rendered":"Time Magazine Deploys AI \u201cAsk Me Anything\u201d Box That Covers Up Its Actual Journalism and Can\u2019t Be Closed"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It may not surprise you that Time <\/em>magazine has elected to highlight the AI industry in its annual \u201cPerson of the Year\u201d issue. Or should we say persons: the collective billionaire \u201carchitects of AI,\u201d it announced.<\/p>\n

But what may surprise you is a new feature prominently displayed on Time<\/em><\/em>\u2018s website: a window for an AI chatbot.<\/p>\n

\u201cAsk me anything,\u201d it reads.<\/p>\n

It does not go away. Instead, the chatbot window stays fixed to the bottom center of your screen, blocking any text that\u2019s in the way. In fact, depending on the size and resolution of your device\u2019s screen, it completely blots out the home page\u2019s featured headline \u2014 including today\u2019s much-discussed article, \u201cPerson of the Year 2025: The Architects of AI<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no x-button to close the AI window, and as far as we can tell, no other means of swatting it away. If you click in the text box, it expands to filling the entire page. Call it an ironic metaphor for the tech and AI\u2019s industry capturing of news and media, if you want. It\u2019s also just plain annoying.<\/p>\n

Emily M. Bender, a computational linguistics expert at the University of Washington and author of the book \u201cThe AI Con,\u201d complained<\/a> about the intrusive AI feature on social media.<\/p>\n

\u201cAny journalistic outfit that values the work of their journalists would offer to present it as papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9,\u201d Bender said of the AI chatbot, \u201cand certainly wouldn\u2019t put that offer in the way of the other bit of journalism their audience might be trying to read.\u201d<\/p>\n

Time<\/em> unveiled<\/a> the AI in late November, though apparently without much fanfare. It\u2019s not merely an AI chatbot, it insists, but an AI agent<\/em> \u2014 meaning it\u2019s supposed to be autonomous \u2014 and trained on the magazine\u2019s 102-year-old archive of nearly 750,000 magazine issues, web articles, and other assets, generating summaries, audio rundowns, and answers to user questions. It was built in partnership with Scale AI, a controversial<\/a> data annotation company whose services are essential to the generative AI industry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople spend hours and hours with agents, and hopefully this means that they will spend a lot more time with our journalism,\u201d Time<\/em> editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs told Axios<\/em><\/a> after its unveiling.<\/p>\n

The \u201cTimeAI\u201d agent wasn\u2019t featured on the magazine\u2019s homepage at launch, which is perhaps why it flew under the radar until now. This, however, is not Time<\/em>\u2018s first stab at experimenting with AI.<\/p>\n

When it crowned Donald Trump as Person of the Year in 2024, Time <\/em>used the announcement to unveil<\/a> what in retrospect seems a prototype of the AI we\u2019re presented with today, also built with Scale AI. One sign of progress, or at least shifting industry trends? It merely called its predecessor an AI chatbot, and not an \u201cagent.\u201d It\u2019s not yet clear how the new AI is supposed to be agentic.<\/p>\n

Certainly Time <\/em>isn\u2019t the only newsroom picking up AI. Outlets like The Washington Post<\/em> and Bloomberg<\/em> have some form of AI that provides a summary of articles or answers questions, though neither are as intrusive as Time<\/em>\u2018s. The New York Times <\/em>uses it to generate headlines<\/a>. WaPo <\/em>is particularly AI obsessed: it\u2019s considered using an AI to help non-professional write entire articles<\/a> that could be published in the paper, and is now launching an AI-generated podcast service<\/a>.<\/p>\n

More on AI:<\/strong> McDonald\u2019s Issues Extremely Weird Response to Its Disastrous AI Ad<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post Time Magazine Deploys AI \u201cAsk Me Anything\u201d Box That Covers Up Its Actual Journalism and Can\u2019t Be Closed<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It may not surprise you that Time magazine has elected to highlight the AI industry in its annual \u201cPerson of the Year\u201d issue. Or should we say persons: the collective…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7351\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}