Time's 2025 Person of the Year frontrunner isn't a person at all. It's AI.
Time magazine on Thursday will unveil its 2025 Person of the Year. And the frontrunner for the annual title, which the publication has bestowed since 1927 (it was called Man of the Year until 1999), isn’t a person at all. It’s artificial intelligence.According to numerous online betting sites, the current favorite for Time’s Person of the Year is AI. The online prediction market Polymarket estimates that AI has more than a 40% chance of nabbing Time’s POY, followed by two executives at leading AI companies: Jensen Huang, founder of the AI chip-making giant Nvidia (20%), and Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, which developed the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT (15%).Pope Leo XIV (7%), President Trump (3%) — Time’s 2024 Person of the Year — New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (3%), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (3%), late conservative activist Charlie Kirk (2%), Chinese President Xi Jinping (2%) and Elon Musk (1%) round out the top 10.Officially, the designation is reserved for “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse,” according to the magazine. But it’s not always an actual person.In fact, it would be the third time that the magazine picked a nonhuman as its person of the year. In 1982, the personal computer was selected as its “Machine of the Year” for its rapid transformation of society. In 1988, Time named “Endangered Earth” as its “Planet of the Year.”In 2006, the magazine picked “You” as its Person of the Year for the “revolution” of early social media users as content creators. (The magazine’s cover that year was a desktop computer.)AI has been on the minds of plenty of real people this year, and despite early optimism, many have expressed concern about potential dangers in the future.A recent Yahoo/YouGov poll found that a majority of Americans (53%) think artificial intelligence is likely to “destroy humanity” someday. According to the survey, which was conducted in late October, 63% of Americans say it’s somewhat or very likely that AI “will become so intellectually advanced that humans won’t be able to control it anymore.”And there appears to be a huge generation gap when it comes to interacting with AI.According to another recent Yahoo/YouGov poll, more than eight in 10 Gen Z adults (82%) say they have used an AI chatbot such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, Grok or Meta AI.Only 33% of their boomer parents and grandparents, however, can say the same. And while AI chatbot use is higher among Gen X-ers (54%) and millennials (68%), it’s still nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is among so-called Zoomers.
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