Even if AI would be ethical and good, I can't trust it's answers and information. It can easily imagine things or have wrong answers and then I still need to check it myself.

I would love for local desktop integration options with studioLM or ollama but never any that use anyone elses hardware

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I would like to see Proton lead the charge in doing AI the right way. Privacy, transparency, and responsibility. There are a lot of downsides to AI, I esp. have the environmental concerns, but proton not pursuing AI will not fix that problem.

If anyone could engineer a solution for GenAI that meets this challenge of transparent and provable privacy, then it’s them.

AI will irreversibly transform people's lives. It will be there whether we want it to be or not. We should control it rationally, and it is wrong to have blind faith in it or to have an allergic reaction to it; there is no good or evil in AI technology itself.

While not taking a stance for or against AI in itself (because it's only a tool), I would like for users to have full transparency as to what data is being used to train any AI models and how said model is learning from that data.

It may not be my first choice as to where resources are deployed, but I am sure a lot of things high on my wish list would be things that others don’t care about. In any event, as long as it’s optional and isn’t forced on anyone, so be it.

Disagree, I think having the optionality of integrating AI tools into Proton would be great. New open source models like Deepseek R1 are seriously helpful and not just some toy AI anymore. The amount of added productivity is tremendous.

People seem to think Proton are going to FORCE the use of AI on to customers. If it's optional (like the Writing Assistant already is!) then you take it or leave it. No need for a generalized pro/anti-AI discussion here.

I decided to give Proton a chance despite some initial misgivings because "at least it's not AI". Don't betray your early adopters like this.

"The mass exploitation of human labour used to tag inputs for these models"

Getting paid to do a job you applied for is not exploitation. There are no slaves involved. Everyone is a willing participant who is being paid for their work and can quit at any time.

"The environmental effects of generating power used to train them"

Oh man, you should see what it takes to keep the Proton servers online. Training an AI model is one-and-done, but making your email work requires constant power generation.

"The obscene amount of fresh drinking water diverted toward cooling"

None? Liquid-cooled computers use closed cooling systems that recycle the same coolant (which isn't even water). Someone lied to you about how this works.

"The degradation of information quality, as the human knowledge encoded in language is substituted with statistical approximations"

If you don't find it useful, don't use it.

The thing is generative AI CAN be made ethically, it's that all the other tech companies don't care about anything but money. Proton did this with Proton Scribe, the blog articles say that it:
1. is trained on a model developed by Proton, so it's (a) not exploiting the work of others and (b) neither giving us misinformation from the internet nor putting more out there.
2. does not save or use input for training and is opt-in only, so doesn't collect any data from us.
3. is only in Proton Mail and can run on your device. It needs 8GB of RAM if run on your device which speaks how much power it needs, but I don't think one person would use a writing AI 1000 times a day like idiots do with other types of genAIs, so the environmental impact shouldn't be much more than any regular device user. GenAI for things such as images and videos are the big polluters here because users generate whole new images/videos/whatever else exists now instead of making small edits, which shouldn't really be an issue with a writing AI since it's just text.

Scribe is a generative AI, but it checks all the boxes for an ethically-made one in my opinion. If Proton HAS to put more AI in its services, as long as they go about it the same way, I think it's fine. They already did with Sentinel, too, which is another thing- not all AI is generative. GenAI as we know it is a very recent concept.

I'm never using Scribe or any genAI, but at the very least, I trust Proton to do it ethically, however mainstream it is.

Proton responded to this post by the way, I suggest everyone read it in the previous comments.

Everyone acting coy saying "but AI is useful for SPAM!" like they don't know OP means the garbage generators currently being hyped by everyone, including Proton. 🙄

I support the use of open models and that is exactly what is needed to avoid largest corporations from monopolizing the space and data. While the use of specific applications is debatable, the long term existence of this and similar technology is undeniable and open source is now more important than ever. As long as these "tools" can be toggled off in the Proton suite I also don't see a problem.
I would say that things like the AI writing assistant are more an applied experiment than anything else for the time being.
If you talk about energy consumption, you need to consider the amout of energy that was and will be saved through optimizations made by AI models to power and resource management.

I understand your concerns, but this are different ideological concerns that the ones that unite us here.

Proton already uses AI for stuff like spam filtering, it's something we all use (even you) in some form in or another and isn't really that new.

I also think that you don't really understand how AI works. If you have a good computer, you could right now run a local model yourself. You also don't need human labor for many of these things, and many models are today open-source, with contributions from the broader FOSS community.

They communicated in one of their blogposts that a large majority of proton's users wanted to have access to AI from proton after their survey. So I think it will move in that direction anyways.

Foolish... For those who don't understand how AI, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, LLMs, and transformers work... it's just a bunch small math concepts combined to be flexible enough to "fit" data.

Like a multidimensional mold.

That's all.. its not good or evil... it's the company that uses it.

The danger is it is such a good mold, it catches EVERYTHING... including any human bias that is in the data... and there is always human bias in the data.

It is powerful and the world needs companies like proton to use it.

The mental gymnastics of people who equate large energy usage with environmental impact is so outdated. Guys, it's how the energy is produced not the fact that you've used a lot of energy. You gotta change your mindset, it's backwards thinking, energy abundance is what the goal is, not energy scarcity.

The environmental inpact is all the reason I need to avoid AI. Back in June I read that an AI search engine uses 5 times the power of a traditional search. It's why I don't use Brave search.

I think sadly this is just the inevitable. Like if they don't do it a rival will. Same worried happened in the industrial revolution.

I think they've been smart by using Mistral and also keeping it small and functional.

Artificial "intelligence" needs to go the way of the phonograph.