VC changes Zoom name to 'I do not consent' as AI recording invades everything

Jeremy Levine has found a blunt workaround for a trend he finds insufferable. The Bessemer Venture Partners investor now joins Zoom calls as “Jeremy Levine I do not consent to transcribing or recording,” according to a new Wall Street Journal piece on the explosion of AI note-taking apps. It might be the most honest name in the meeting. The man is drawing a line in the sand, and he’s not alone in thinking the always-on recording era has jumped the shark.

The numbers back up the ubiquity. The article points to apps like Granola, which is being used well outside the boardroom. One San Francisco founder told the Journal she records most of her first dates with the app, then feeds the raw transcript into Anthropic’s Claude for a post-mortem. The goal? To get an AI’s read on whether she seemed “engaging or empathetic” and to analyze who dominated the conversation. VC Eric Bahn says he now walks into every founder meeting with the default assumption that a recording is already rolling, no phone-on-the-table required. The consent ship, he implies, has quietly sailed.

Levine’s objection isn’t just curmudgeonly. He calls the practice “socially unacceptable behavior” that puts a freeze on the kind of unguarded, spontaneous conversation where real trust gets built. He’s got a point. When every half-baked idea or offhand remark is captured and searchable, people clam up. Other voices in the piece flag the obvious legal minefield, especially in two-party consent states where recording without permission is a fast track to a lawsuit. The social norms haven’t caught up to the technology, and the resulting tension is turning every interaction into a potential deposition.

But the most damning question the piece raises is a practical one. If every meeting, watercooler chat, and ill-advised date gets transcribed and summarized by an AI, who is actually reading this stuff? We’re building an audio landfill of every fleeting human interaction, and the dirty secret is that nobody has time to sift through the transcript of a Tuesday standup from three weeks ago. At some point, a perfectly archived record of everything you’ve ever said stops being a superpower and becomes the world’s most boring, unreadable memoir.