The AI debate, word for word. No narrator, no verdict.

To keep a record. The debate about AI matters, and it moves fast: a promise from 2023 is hard to find today, and last spring’s warning is buried under this week’s. AI Zeitgeist documents what was said, without framing and without judgement, keeps it with date and source, and puts it back in time. The Time Machine runs the wall for any month since November 2022, so you can see what the world was saying then, and set it next to what it says now. The data is open, for anyone who wants to work with it.

And to be honest, it is also an experiment. We want to find out whether a calm format, with no take and no outrage, can find an audience in a loud debate. If it does, the wall can go further: onto big screens in galleries, lobbies and public spaces, with other words and other audiences.

Almost everything we read about AI reaches us already framed. A headline picks the angle, a feed picks the side, a comment picks the opponent. By the time a sentence arrives, someone has told us what to think of it.

AI Zeitgeist leaves that layer out. Every quote stands as it was said, verbatim, dated and linked to its original source. A warning stands next to a promise, a lab founder next to a philosopher, a law next to an ad slogan. There is no commentary, no ranking and no score, and the wall takes no side: not for AI, not against it.

On the wall there are not even names. Who said it is one click away, so you read the sentence before you know whom to agree with.

Because nothing is framed, nothing is decided for you. You put the voices together, you notice what contradicts what, and you form an opinion of your own. That is the whole idea. Balance starts with the sources: sceptics sit next to vendors on purpose.

AI Zeitgeist is made by Büro Bloock, a design studio in Cologne, run by its managing partner Sascha van den Bloock. The studio works on branding, corporate design, web design and editorial design for companies, institutions and brands with complex content.

Its approach, in its own words: structure before surface, clarity before effects, and work that starts with questions, not colours. AI Zeitgeist applies that idea to a public debate: the words first, and design that stays out of their way.

AI Zeitgeist is the studio’s own project, not a commission. Concept, design and development are by Büro Bloock. It is independent and not funded by anyone on the wall.

Sources. Every day the pipeline reads 155 sources: 74 feeds from newsrooms, AI labs, newsletters, podcasts, research institutes and philosophy magazines, plus 81 news searches for the people and topics that shape the field. The full list is public on the sources page. It is a reading list, not a list of endorsements. A pre-filter keeps articles from the last day and a half that are about AI.

Distilling with Claude. For each article, Claude, the language model by Anthropic, reads the full text under fixed rules and proposes at most two quotes. A quote must be verbatim, ideally one to eight words, never more than 100 characters, and must work alone on a black screen. Product launches, benchmarks, funding rounds and headlines do not qualify; private individuals never do. A neutrality rule tells the model to judge a line only by how clearly it says something, never by which side it is on, and never to prefer alarm because it sounds more dramatic. Most articles yield nothing. Quotes in other languages keep their original wording next to an English translation and are marked as translated.

Verbatim check. The model proposes, code decides. Every quote must appear word for word in the article text (case and punctuation aside), or it is rejected. Only slogans and labels of up to three words may stand without a speaker, at most one a day. Code also rejects anything too long, anything already in the archive or too similar to a quote in it, and anything on the block list, and allows no more than six quotes from any single source.

Human review. The run starts at 11:00. Right after it, the editor gets a digest by mail with every proposed quote, its context and its source, and can remove any of them; removed quotes go on a block list and never come back. At noon, exactly what is left goes live.

Balance. A balancing system runs alongside every step. It makes sure that no single camp, source or kind of voice takes over the wall, and that quiet voices are not crowded out by loud ones. It never rates a quote and never decides on its own; it gives the editor a view of the mix, and the editor decides.

The wall. One canvas, drawn in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, no framework. The current quote types itself in large, earlier quotes drift behind it. One typeface, Schibsted Grotesk, black, an off-white and one green. Click a quote for speaker, date, context and source. Daily quotes stay on the wall for 30 days, then live on in the archive. The Curated set is chosen by hand: the classics, the slogans, the vocabulary.

Context and Who else? Every quote has its own page with two tabs. Context says who said it, where and when. Who else? adds one factual sentence on what the quote refers to and up to five other quotes on the same question: agreement, pushback or another angle.

Time Machine and archive. On the first of every month the previous month is frozen as a snapshot. The Time Machine runs the wall for any month or year back to November 2022. The months before September 2026 were filled in afterwards from the sources of the time, under the same rules. The archive holds every quote, from Ada Lovelace in 1843 to today, with search and filters, and pages for every speaker, topic and year.

Open data. All quotes are available as JSON under CC BY 4.0 (the compilation; the quotes stay with their authors), along with the live set, the monthly snapshots and the Who else? data. There is an RSS feed, a Daily by mail with every new quote right after noon, an llms.txt for language models, and AI Zeitgeist is coming to TRMNL e-ink displays.

Stack. A Node.js pipeline on a small server of our own, run once a day. Claude via the Anthropic API, with prompt caching. A static site, served as plain files: every quote has a permalink with its own share image. Analytics only with consent; likes are counted anonymously. Questions about the method: hello@aizeitgeist.tv