I do avoid LLMs on principle. I find the technology and the manner in which it is used repugnant for a variety of reasons, most but not all of which I’ve already elaborated on here. At this point, I hate it even in the very niche scenario where it is useful, precisely because I think it does too much harm to be deserving of acceptance in any field at all. The most I can say for it is that I might be willing to slowly change that stance once this horrid bubble pops and the world stops getting set aflame for the sake of stock options.

Given your befuddlement at my stance though, I feel I should highlight and restate the following:

Almost nobody actually wanted Proton to make this. They just went and did it to chase a trend, ignoring the many people who hate it all the while. The last thing I need is for the the company that my email depends on to start getting dragged around by tech bros. If they’re willing to make a decision as rash and irresponsible as that, it is a clear indicator that worse is to come.

The presence of an LLM on a site is indicative to me of the character of those running it. It speaks to trend-following, a lack of understanding, and disdain for the intricacies of human work. If they weren’t trend-followers, they’d understand that LLMs have utterly failed to prove themselves as actually useful and would hold off to see if they ever do before using them. If they understood what was going on, they’d know that what LLMs actually do is typically irrelevant to most businesses. If they had any respect for the depths of creativity or effort, they’d know that what modern-day “AI” creates is a hollow imitation; a series of black-boxes that vaguely approximate a thing without having the capacity to understand anything that makes it up. And they’d know that in so doing such software creates something broken that serves only to devalue the efforts of real artists and writers, both in how it convinces studios to ignorantly fire them to improve a number at the expense of quality, and in how its rampant use as a cheating tool engenders environments of serious distrust.

If someone’s got an LLM on their site, or if they’ve decided to offer an LLM of their own through their business, they communicate to me a serious deficit in their understanding of the world at large. That the only thing they’re interested in is a graph someone showed them at a marketing meeting. They want metrics for investors, not a good product—and if that’s the kind of goals they’ve got, what reason have I to believe they won’t step on me to accomplish them?

Proton is making an LLM, and from that I know that their leadership is failing and that their future is likely bleak. I can’t trust my email in those hands.