Overview
TIME is Redefining the Media and Publishing Industry with Generative AI
TIME and Scale revolutionize media publishing by leveraging the power of Generative AI to bring TIME’s trusted journalism to the world in exciting new ways. Together we built TIME AI, the first interactive Generative AI experience for TIME Person of the Year.
The TIME AI experience includes text and audio summaries, voice interactions, translations, audio, and conversational chat, enabling readers to immerse themselves in the history and background of the Person of the Year. Custom guardrails keep the model on topic and safe for use.
The Problem
TIME Needed to Quickly Build an Immersive and Trustworthy AI Solution
The media industry faces an existential risk due to the rise of Generative AI technology. As media consumption preferences are changing, TIME wanted to lean in and push the boundaries of what it meant to engage with their content.
They needed to move past a traditional article's static, linear experience and even beyond an out-of-the-box conversational chat experience. They needed a solution that was unique to TIME and that reflected the organization's high quality standards and their foundation of trusted journalism.
TIME wanted to build an AI solution that could guide readers deeper into articles, enhance comprehension, maintain their editorial voice, and operate safely—all while blocking inappropriate content.
TIME also needed this solution to be safe to maintain their foundation of trusted journalism. TIME person of the Year is usually highly contentious and the subject of lively debate.
Finally, TIME needed a partner that was capable of accelerating from proposal to production solution in just two months.
The Solution
Scale Delivers a Unique and Trustworthy AI Solution in Two Months
Scale designed and built a dynamic, interactive, and multimodal solution to highlight the 2024 TIME Person of the Year Donald Trump, and the winners from the three previous years, Taylor Swift, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Elon Musk.
Text and audio summaries make it easier to consume the articles, while voice input and conversational chat add depth to the experience.
The articles were translated into seven languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Russian, and Ukrainian. The conversational chat experience is contextually aware of the Person of the Year articles and other related articles from TIME’s archives.
Readers can ask TIME AI questions like: "What are Donald Trump’s plans for foreign policy?" or "How do Taylor Swift’s record sales compare to other successful musicians in the 20th and 21st century?" or "Has the Russia - Ukraine border been disputed in the past?". They can also catch up on past editions by listening to articles in a podcast format while multitasking or receive concise summaries focused on the subjects within the content that matter most to them.
Implementation
Scale integrated fine-tuned models from its partner OpenAI to provide the chat, summarization, and translation capabilities, and ElevenLabs for audio functionality. Scale fine-tuned these models on TIME’s vast archives of proprietary articles.
Scale implemented comprehensive guardrails for the system by drawing on extensive previous red-teaming and AI safety work done for the U.S. Government and Fortune 500 enterprises.
To tune the TIME AI guardrails, Scale used in-house red-teaming to establish and enforce strict safety standards. Over 7,000 attack vectors were tested to protect against AI misuse and custom-tailored attacks.
Red-teaming is essential in the AI development lifecycle, serving as a safeguard to proactively identify vulnerabilities, biases, and harmful behaviors that could arise under unexpected conditions. By constantly iterating and refining the model's responses through these techniques, we ensure that the model is resilient against a wide spectrum of adversarial inputs and tailored to TIME's editorial voice.
Scale delivered these features in less than two months from proposal to production deployment. The Scale team accelerated the development of this application with Scale GenAI Platform (SGP), using building blocks for fine-tuning, frontier evaluations, red-teaming, guardrails, monitoring, and more.
The Result
TIME Redefines How People Experience and Engage with their Trusted Journalism
With TIME AI, TIME has extended its audience, expanded accessibility, and increased engagement. But this project was about more than just driving engagement—it was about staying relevant in a changing media landscape. By providing dynamic, interactive, multimodal experiences that are personalizable and customizable, TIME positioned itself as a disruptive leader.
The innovative partnership between TIME and Scale garnered attention not just for the Person of the Year content, but for the groundbreaking way it was delivered. This strengthened TIME's position as a forward-thinking, relevant media brand at the intersection of trusted journalism and cutting-edge technology.
Looking ahead, TIME and Scale are building even more ambitious and disruptive experiences across their digital footprint.