Machines are instruments, not persons

Two ways in. Some quotes are chosen by hand and meant to hold for years, though the selection does change: the classics, the slogans, the vocabulary, and a few lines we wrote ourselves, always marked as ours.

Most arrive with the news: they are distilled once a day from 170 sources: media, company blogs, newsletters, philosophy magazines and research institutes, plus news searches for the people and topics that shape the field, from lab CEOs and heads of state to the philosophers asking what any of this means (the full list), by a language model working under fixed rules, then checked in code: length, no names on the wall, no duplicates, and for quotes the exact wording must appear in the source. A person reads every proposal before it goes live at noon and can remove it. Every quote is then checked a second time against its source: the exact words, the speaker, the date. What can't be confirmed doesn't go up. No voice gets more than one line a day and no outlet more than three. Quotes from before the daily update began were added later the same way, from the news of their day, and approved one by one.

There is no daily quota: a quiet day adds nothing, a loud one adds a dozen. News quotes leave the wall after 30 days and stay in the archive. When no one in particular said a line, it says what it is instead of a name: a company’s slogan, a document, a term, words an AI produced, a line of our own.

Partly. The daily quotes are proposed by a model and filtered by code; a person reads every proposal before it goes live and can remove it. The hand-picked quotes, our own lines and everything on this page are written by people. Which is to say: the wall is about AI, made with AI, and the arguments on it are not the machine’s.

Because on the wall the sentences should meet as equals. A slogan next to a warning next to a law. Who said what matters, and the archive tells you, one click away. On the wall it would only tell you whom to agree with.

On the first of every month, the previous month is frozen as a snapshot: the hand-picked quotes as they stood plus every news quote of that month. The Time Machine lets you run the wall for any month or year back to November 2022, when ChatGPT launched. The months before September 2026 were filled in afterwards from the sources of the time, with the same rules as the daily update. It is the closest thing to a mood diary of the AI debate.

Try the Time Machine on the Wall

Once a day at noon Berlin time. The ring around the date fills over 24 hours; click it for the countdown. In the archive, a new quote shows its date in green with a green dot for a day. Click the date to see everything new today.

The quotes belong to whoever said them; short quotes with attribution are fine under quotation rules. The wallpaper download and the embed code are for personal use. For anything else, write.

The note at the bottom of the wall counts everyone who has the wall open at this moment, one per device, refreshed every 15 seconds. No names, no accounts, nothing stored (see Privacy). Click or tap the smiley next to it and one small smiley per person jumps out. Throw them around, stack them on the quote and watch them fall when it changes.

Alone on the wall? Try it with 60 people. That is a demo with a made-up number; the real count is not affected.

The Like button in the quote view and in the archive saves the quote in your browser, nowhere else. The 3 button at the top of the wall then shows only your liked quotes on the wall. Clear your browser data and your likes are gone.

Each like also adds one to a public count per quote. It is anonymous: no account, no name, no IP address stored. While you have the wall open and someone else likes a quote, a short note at the top tells you which one and links to it:

Büro Bloock, a design studio in Cologne. AI Zeitgeist is an independent project, not funded by anyone on the wall. Errors, missing sources, a quote that should not be here: hello@aizeitgeist.tv.

Yes. The press page has a short profile in English and German, key facts, the launch video, logos as SVG, EPS and PNG, and 20 screenshots of the wall, the Time Machine, the speaker, topic and year pages and the mobile view, all in one ZIP. The compilation is open data under CC BY 4.0; the quotes stay with their authors.

Open the Press Page

Yes. We won’t say where, that would spoil it. It is off the record, it takes a little persistence, and so far it has mostly been found by people who click things they probably shouldn’t. If you find it, keep it to yourself. Or don’t: everything on this wall ends up quoted eventually.

No ads, no profiles. Fonts are served from this site and your settings live in your browser. Likes are counted anonymously: one number per quote, nothing about you. We use Google Analytics to see which quotes travel, but only if you allow it in the small note at the bottom. You can change that choice any time. See the privacy notice and imprint.