Person of the Year: Charlie Kirk or AI Architects?

One man should have been Time Magazine’s 2025 Person of the Year, and that’s the late Charlie Kirk. Instead, yesterday Time announced that the architects of artificial intelligence had won the honor.

First, a few thoughts about Kirk. He was profoundly influential in his 31 years, launching Turning Point USA at age 18 and working tirelessly for the next 13 years to equip young people with a solid foundation in classical liberal thinking. Contrary to the haters, he did not peddle hate — quite the opposite, in fact. He cheerfully engaged in respectful dialogue in ways that completely elude most angry left-wingers who now hate free speech.

“Get married,” he often said. “Have children. Build a legacy. Pass down your values. Pursue the eternal. Seek true joy.” Not exactly hateful stuff, but he was shot in the throat for saying it.

Yesterday, Tyler Robinson, the man who almost certainly pulled the trigger to assassinate Kirk on September 10, entered the courtroom for the first day of his trial. May justice be done.

The day before, Kirk’s widow, Erika, finally truly broke her silence about the disgusting smears and conspiracy theories being peddled, particularly by the likes of Candace Owens, about Charlie’s murder. I.e., that TPUSA and the Jews were in on it. He was “betrayed,” Owens keeps telling her listeners, and aaaaaannnnyyyyyy minute now, the wealthy podcaster-turned-investigative genius is going to name names and provide evidence.

I’m not holding my breath.

Erika pleaded for the false harassment to “stop.” Despite previously promising to stop if Erika asked her to, Owens won’t stop because her only real mission is to get more clicks on her podcast. Only 24% of Americans know that a radical leftist killed Kirk, and Owens has played a large role in the deception. That makes Erika’s anger over this “mind virus” all the more justified.

Kirk’s murder was the most high-profile political assassination in America since Martin Luther King Jr.‘s in 1963. His voice only grew stronger in death as TPUSA chapters and membership have exploded in the three months since.

He is the person of the year, whether Time acknowledges that fact or not.

Why didn’t Time choose him? Because that would be controversial, and Time’s editors chose not to go that route, though they’ve done so before. Just to pick random honorees from a hat, Donald Trump was named Person of the Year in 2016 and again in 2024. The actual Adolf Hitler — not Trump — was Man of the Year in 1938. MLK was Man of the Year in 1963. In 2019, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg won the honor. And in 1982, the magazine named the personal computer its Machine of the Year.

All that said, I also have plenty to say about Time’s choice. Notably, I’ll start with the fact that Time chose the architects of AI, not AI itself.

This perhaps overlooked semantic nugget quickly became the focal point of our editorial conversation this morning. Could AI ever be considered a “person”? If given a prompt to, for example, “be fruitful and multiply,” could AI gain enough knowledge and ability to gain sentient personhood? People are made in God’s image. AI is made in man’s image. What are the implications of these truths?

All of that would make for a fantastic podcast episode for our Pop-Culture Contrarian team, but that’s all I’ll say about that matter for the moment.

When I was gathering material for what I anticipated would be my topic this morning, I found something quite interesting: AI is very much in the headlines daily, and Time isn’t without justification in recognizing “an AI boom that is transforming the planet.” Over the last three to four years and for perhaps decades to come, AI has changed and will change much of what we know and experience in the world. Actually, it’s hard to overstate that.

AI is as revolutionary as the personal computer, the automobile, or gunpowder. (Sidebar: Imagine naming the guy who invented the 1911 pistol the Man of the Year. Like guns, AI is a tool, and it all depends on how a person uses it.)

That brings me to a key point: AI is already being used for good and ill, so it’s certainly any more free of controversy than Kirk.

Here are a few of the headlines on the subject I found just this morning:

As Time Magazine put it, “This year, the debate about how to wield AI responsibly gave way to a sprint to deploy it as fast as possible.” Yeah, you could say that!

Time also notes, “Researchers have found that AIs can scheme, deceive, or blackmail. As the leading companies’ models improve, AI systems may eventually outcompete humans — as if an advanced species were on the cusp of colonizing the earth. AI flooded social media with misinformation and deepfake videos, and Pope Leo XIV warned that it could manipulate children and serve ‘antihuman ideologies.’”

In October, Trump hilariously used it to put a sombrero on Hakeem Jeffries. As one of the above headlines notes, California Governor Gavin Newsom used it to show Trump, Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller being handcuffed and perp-walked, a thing that until five minutes before that was outrage-worthy on the Left.

Trump’s AI executive order supersedes state regulations of AI. “It’s got to be one source,” the president said. “You can’t go to 50 different sources.”

In short, yeah, AI is a big deal. It’s a revolutionary technology that will lead us to places we can’t yet imagine.

Even so, I wish Time’s editors had the human decency to choose Charlie Kirk as Person of the Year.

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