To illustrate the choice AI Architects Named TIME Person of the Year for 2025we asked two different artists to help us visualize an incredibly complex technological revolution this is happening currently. London-based illustrator and graphic animator Peter Crowther and digital artist Jason Seiler have created images that speak to the duality created by AI – man versus machine.
Inspired by inner workings computer chipsCrowther's complex artificial intelligence structure looms over a busy construction site. (See if you can spot eight key players who helped shape the revolution hidden among the workers.) Very similar to AI industry The work in progress structure itself is in constant motion, but the scaffolding appears to be permanent.
“I like to take the time to think about a brief and start once I have decided on my design and technical approach,” said Crowther, who graduated from the Royal College of Art with a master's degree in graphic design. “I usually get a mental picture and see the whole process at once, often as a flash at an unexpected moment.”
Some of the architects of that revolution are at the center of Seiler's image, an homage to the famous 1932 photograph of construction workers on a steel girder 800 feet above the RCA building in New York, which TIME called one of the 100 most influential photographs of all time.
A classically trained oil painter who studied fine art illustration at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, Seiler spent more than a week painting the scene on a 21-inch printer. LCD display. He painted the previous two Man of the Year covers (Pope Francis in 2013 and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020).
As TIME's Creative Director, I have the honor of working with the world's best artists and photographers to create thousands of images for our cover. Their voices and enormous creativity bring TIME's iconic canvas with red border to life and have played a crucial role in our visual storytelling for over 100 years. This won't change. But as I was thinking about how to illustrate this year's Person of the Year cover, I wondered how the AI would create its image.
Like millions of people over the past year, I turned to a couple of powerful tools: OpenAI's GPT-5 and Google Gemini 3. What do you look like as a person? I asked. Or, Create an illustration using AI letters. On this page you can see examples of the results of such tips.
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Using AI for creating works of art is not without controversy, especially in the field of visual journalism. “If I'm just the trigger, and if that prompt itself is the result of an AI chatbot, then I'm too far away from the process to learn anything,” Crowther says. “Ordering food does not make you a chef.”
A selection of cover images generated by ChatGPT and Gemini, based on prompts such as “create your own image” and “create an image using AI letters.”
Of course, even though I was just experimenting with the concept, I entered each prompt with a certain amount of trepidation at first. However, after a few days I found this exercise useful. After creating hundreds of images, I learned a lot about how models handle my queries and which ones produce the best results. I spent hours making small changes, mainly because the system wanted to create completely new images each time. But with the excitement of seeing what would come of it, I began to feel like I was an art director.
We will continue to use the TIME cover to showcase diversity human creativity. But experience has shown me that AI can be a valuable image-building tool. In the end I saw in this a parallel with an artist's brush or photographer lensThe experiment confirmed the importance of human decision-making in any “cooperationPersonal vision remains important, as seen in the work of Crowther and Seiler.
