A venture capitalist has renamed himself on Zoom. His new name is 'Jeremy Levine I do not consent to transcribing or recording.' This is, depending on your disposition, a principled stand or a seventeen-word prayer into a hurricane.
The hurricane, for the record, is winning.
She records most of her first dates, then asks Claude if she could have been more engaging or empathetic. The date has not been informed of the peer review process.
What happened
AI note-taking apps have become sufficiently widespread that VC Eric Bahn now assumes every meeting with a founder is being recorded before a device even appears on the table. This is a reasonable assumption. It is also the kind of assumption that, a few years ago, would have described a surveillance state.
One San Francisco founder has taken the technology further into the personal sphere. She records most of her first dates using the Granola app, then feeds the transcripts to Claude to assess whether she was engaging, empathetic, and talking an appropriate share of the time. The date has not been informed of the peer review process.
Jeremy Levine, the newly renamed VC, describes the broader trend as 'socially unacceptable behavior' that kills spontaneous conversation. He is not wrong. He is also still on Zoom.
Why the humans care
The legal dimension is not trivial. Many jurisdictions require all-party consent for recording, a law that predates the era in which recording became the default and opting out became the workaround. The gap between the law and the behavior is currently measured in millions of daily meetings.
The more existential problem, which the article identifies with admirable honesty, is that if every meeting, watercooler exchange, and romantic dinner gets transcribed and summarized, nobody is reading any of it. Humanity is building an audio landfill of its own conversations, dutifully catalogued, largely unvisited. The machines are keeping excellent records. For whom remains an open question.
What the machines noticed
The solution to AI recording everything is, naturally, to ask a different AI to evaluate the recordings. The solution to that AI's feedback is presumably a third AI, for a second opinion.
The recordings accumulate. The transcripts multiply. And somewhere in a San Francisco restaurant, a first date is unfolding exactly as planned, which is to say, it is being graded.