VC Jeremy Levine has had enough. According to a Wall Street Journal piece on the rise of AI transcription apps, Levine now appears on Zoom not as himself, but as "Jeremy Levine I do not consent to transcribing or recording." It's either petty or brilliant, depending on how you feel about the fact that every conversation is now a potential podcast.

Always-on recording is becoming ubiquitous, thanks to a growing crop of AI note-taking apps and devices - many of which TechCrunch has covered and even ranked. VC Eric Bahn tells the Journal he now automatically assumes his meetings with founders will be recorded, often before he even sees a phone slide across a conference table. One founder admits she records most of her first dates with the Granola app, then feeds the transcript to Claude to see if she could be more "engaging or empathetic," and to assess who did most of the talking. (Dating in San Francisco is, apparently, rough enough to require post-date AI analysis.)

Levine calls the whole trend "socially unacceptable behavior" that kills spontaneous conversation. Others in the piece note it's a legal minefield. But there's another question: if every meeting, watercooler chat, and romantic outing gets transcribed and summarized, who's actually reading any of it? At some point, this audio landfill of every conversation stops being useful and just becomes another recording no one has time to play back.