It's weird to me how often this analogy gets used because:

1. In most cases, like this one, the product isn't heroin.

2. Drug dealers don't actually do that.

> "1. In most cases, like this one, the product isn't heroin."

I'm not sure about that. Someone using AI for productivity every day will experience massive issues if you suddenly take it away.

It's even the whole business model of MS Copilot: They don't work with companies to have their data structured in the past or going forward.

They don't help you to structure your business "life", they offer a tool you consume to make sense of it while you use it.

The moment you stop using it, you'll struggle to even make sense of your own past actions.

> "2. Drug dealers don't actually do that."

It would be a weird business if they only WAIT for people to demand the more profitable drugs...

If you're genuinely curious, I'd recommend searching around about the history of this persistent urban legend. It's really interesting.

But the short version is that there are lots of people who want to buy any given drug and drug dealers sell them. I don't know exactly what you mean by "WAIT for people to demand the more profitable drugs", but there typically isn't a whole lot of waiting. There's a lot of demand out there. Giving away a bunch of free fentanyl to random people in the hopes that one of them instantly gets addicted would be a pretty wasteful and high risk sales tactic, especially given the number of people that want to buy it already.

Are you sure the product isn't heroin? If we take it away, there's a bunch of people around here at least that will definitely experience withdrawal.

...yes? It doesn't literally kill you if use more tokens than usual?

And we're talking about subscription plans from OpenAI/Anthropic here. Switching to a different model and/or harness if the price changes isn't a "the world has run out of opioids and I'm going to need a detox center" level crisis.

You're describing the impact of overuse or moving to another dealer, not withdrawing from it altogether ;)

The original question was "are you sure an OpenAI subscription isn't heroin?" Different impacts of overuse (death vs slop code) feels like a valid point of difference.

This is a weirdly melodramatic analogy.

If you want to flatten everything to "all things habit forming are definitionally equivalent", you'll get some pretty funky results.

You're equivocating, they were talking about addiction, you're talking about overuse/overdose which is where the analogy breaks down for pretty obvious reasons.

I'm not sure exactly what you're implying but if you're curious, there's a lot of writing about the persistence of this particular urban legend. A lot of it starts with 1920s newspapers painting pictures of dastardly drug peddlers luring in children with free drugs to get them hooked.

Turns out that drug dealers by and large prefer the straightforward approach of selling drugs to the huge market of people who want to take them.

Another way to look at it is they are running a business. It's not even close to gambling for example.

Running businesses at massive losses with the expectation of making that money back by being _the_ monopoly on this technology.