--- title: "Time Magazine Deploys AI “Ask Me Anything” Box That Covers Up Its Actual Journalism and Can’t Be Closed" description: "The website for Time magazine now features a big AI chatbox that can't be closed and won't go away, blocking even its main headlines." date: "2025-12-11" modified: "2025-12-11" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/time-magazine-ai-chatbot" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" --- # Time Magazine Deploys AI “Ask Me Anything” Box That Covers Up Its Actual Journalism and Can’t Be Closed ![The website for Time magazine now features a big AI chatbox that can't be closed and won't go away, blocking even its main headlines.]() *Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Time Magazine* It may not surprise you that *Time* magazine has elected to highlight the AI industry in its annual "Person of the Year" issue. Or should we say persons: the collective billionaire "architects of AI," it announced. But what may surprise you is a new feature prominently displayed on **Time**'s website: a window for an AI chatbot. "Ask me anything," it reads. It does not go away. Instead, the chatbot window stays fixed to the bottom center of your screen, blocking any text that's in the way. In fact, depending on the size and resolution of your device's screen, it completely blots out the home page's featured headline — including today's much-discussed article, "[Person of the Year 2025: The Architects of AI]()." There's 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's industry capturing of news and media, if you want. It's also just plain annoying. Emily M. Bender, a computational linguistics expert at the University of Washington and author of the book "The AI Con," [complained]() about the intrusive AI feature on social media. "Any journalistic outfit that values the work of their journalists wouldn't offer to present it as papier-mâché," Bender said of the AI chatbot, "and certainly wouldn't put that offer in the way of the other bit of journalism their audience might be trying to read." *Time* [unveiled]() the AI in late November, though apparently without much fanfare. It's not merely an AI chatbot, it insists, but an AI *agent* — meaning it's supposed to be autonomous — and trained on the magazine's 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]() data annotation company whose services are [essential to the generative AI industry](). "People spend hours and hours with agents, and hopefully this means that they will spend a lot more time with our journalism," *Time* editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs [told *Axios*]() after its unveiling. The "TimeAI" agent wasn't featured on the magazine's homepage at launch, which is perhaps why it flew under the radar until now. This, however, is not *Time*'s first stab at experimenting with AI. When it crowned Donald Trump as Person of the Year in 2024, *Time* used the announcement to [unveil]() what in retrospect seems a prototype of the AI we're 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 "agent." It's not yet clear how the new AI is supposed to be agentic. Certainly *Time* isn't the only newsroom picking up AI. Outlets like *The Washington Post* and *Bloomberg* have some form of AI that provides a summary of articles or answers questions, though neither are as intrusive as *Time*'s. The *New York Times* [uses it to generate headlines](). *WaPo* is particularly AI obsessed: it's considered [using an AI to help non-professional write entire articles]() that could be published in the paper, and is now [launching an AI-generated podcast service](). **More on AI:** [*McDonald’s Issues Extremely Weird Response to Its Disastrous AI Ad*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()