Artist Refik Anadol designed the TIME100 AI cover

Turkish-born media artist Refik Anadol, featured on this year's TIME100 AI list, has created a striking project for the cover of TIME magazine. Anadol trained his studio's AI system on an archive of more than 5,000 magazine covers spanning over 100 years.

The resulting abstract image, with the artist's signature fluid and molecular aesthetic, symbolizes AI's imagining of TIME's 100-year visual history.

The modular, multimodal AI system developed by Anadol and his team, Large Nature Model, is the product of extensive research and collaboration. The model was trained on the most comprehensive ethical dataset ever collected from the natural world. This dataset consists of over half a billion images from the archives of institutions such as the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Natural History Museum of London, as well as data collected directly from 16 rainforests.

Anadol, whose work has been exhibited at the MoMA Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Serpentine Galleries in London, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, also received support from Nvidia and Google Cloud on the project. The work also utilized Meta's Llama and Google's Gemini models in some stages of the system.

Refik Anadol and his team analyzed all the covers of TIME magazine by extracting thematic and historical data and used this data to run the artificial intelligence system in two different modes titled "Future cover" and "Archive dream".

The TIME cover was created in "archive dream" mode, blending the magazine's century-long archive with Anadol's artistic interpretation. The main cover image was generated by AI, while details such as the text, the exhibition context, and the Anadol silhouette added for scale were determined by human guidance. The cover can be viewed online as a continuous video loop.

The artist, who creates his works with the idea that the future is not a fixed destination to be feared but a fluid reality that can be shaped, states that the TIME cover can also be a museum in a sense.