VC Jeremy Levine has a tongue-in-cheek solution to something that routinely bothers him, according to a new Wall Street Journal article on the rise of AI transcription applications. On Zoom, it is no longer “Jeremy Levine” but “Jeremy Levine, I do not consent to transcribe or record.”

It may sound mean or brilliant, depending on your point of view, but what’s clear is that always-on recording is becoming ubiquitous, thanks to a growing crop of AI note-taking apps and devices, many of which we’ve covered here at TechCrunch (we’ve even ranked some).

VC Eric Bahn tells the outlet that he now automatically assumes his meetings with founders will be recorded, even before seeing a phone slide across a conference table. One founder tells the WSJ that she records most of her first dates with the Granola app and then passes the transcript to Claude to see if she can be more “attractive or empathetic,” while also evaluating who did the most talking.

Levine calls the whole trend “socially unacceptable behavior” that can completely kill spontaneous conversations. Others in the article point out that it is a legal minefield.

But there’s another problem: If every meeting, quiet conversation, and romantic outing is transcribed and summarized, who’s really reading anything? At what point does this audio dump of every conversation stop being useful and become just another recording that no one has time to play?