One day we will look back on these unloved AI 'features' and have a chuckle

Assuming humans survive that long

Photo © 2025 Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu

“When do we get copies of the AI summary?”

Eh? What AI summary? I didn’t generate one. But one of the team reckons I did and she wants a copy of it, please.

We’re just coming to the end of a looooong videoconference which included an intensely boring section in which some cack-handed tedious twat fumbled and mumbled over a shared screen for an hour, demonstrating the latest iteration of the user interface on the software project we’re working on.

Yes, dear reader, you have guessed. That TT with the cack in his hand was me.

Despite my regularly expressed reservations about the reality of AI compared with the hype, I admit that getting an AI to summarise the videoconf as bullet points could provide some post-meeting amusement. My colleagues’ contributions were mostly PowerPoint decks containing slide after slide of bullet points, which they read aloud verbatim in a monotone. I am sure the team would have found a bullet list of everyone’s bullet lists most valuable.

So when asked for such an AI summary, I naturally blurted out something along the lines of “Might you explain what is is to which you are referring?”

My colleague pointed out that there had been an announcement at the beginning of the meeting that it was going to be transcribed and summarised. Ah. Would this announcement have been given in something approximating to what we in Yurp refer to as “an American accent”? Maybe, she said, less certain. The fact that none of us speak this way, being stuck-up Brits of one sort or another, was an important clue. The promise of an AI summary had been announced by the AI, not by a person.

What I hadn’t realised was that an AI feature had sneakily been transcribing and summarising the meeting behind my back. Or not so much behind my back as out of earshot.

Apparently when you launch the videoconf software and join a meeting these days, a rootin’ tootin’ hotdang of an AI voice announces the fact. I was unaware because I never bother to put on my headphones until the videoconf software is already running.

Why would I? I mean, who listens to an application launching? What would you be hoping to hear? The bits and bytes lining up in nice rows? The turning of the Earth on its axis? John C Dvorak saying “Let’s open up some databases and get to work”?