How Artist Refik Anadol Made the 2025 TIME100 AI Cover

To create this year's TIME100 AI cover, artist Refik Anadol, who is included on this year's list, trained his studio's AI system on an archive containing each of TIME's more than 5,000 covers to date, spanning over 100 years. The resulting abstract visualization--featuring Anadol's signature flowing, molecular aesthetic--represents the AI "dreaming" about a century of TIME's visual history, he says. Dubbed the Large Nature Model by internationally renowned Turkish-American media artist Anadol and his team, his modular multimodal AI system is the product of extensive research and collaboration. According to Anadol's studio, the model was trained on "the most extensive, ethically collected dataset of the natural world," combining over half a billion images from the archives of organizations including the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution, and London's Natural History Museum with data collected directly from 16 rainforests. Anadol, whose work has been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, London's Serpentine Galleries, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao also worked with tech giants Nvidia and Google Cloud, which provided computing resources, while models such as Meta's Llama and Google's Gemini play a range of roles under the hood.