The People Who Mocked AI Are Now Paying $200 a Month for It | EddieSilva.com
A few years ago, liking AI publicly was almost enough to get you blocked. Today, many of the same people who mocked it are paying premium prices to use it. The lesson is simple: technology does not wait for your approval.
I do not remember the exact day I signed up for the ChatGPT Plus waitlist.
That happened earlier.
But Gmail helped me recover a different memory: the day the invitation arrived.
On December 8, 2023, I received the email from OpenAI inviting me to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus.
It was valid for ten days.
At the time, it felt like a simple product email. Another invitation. Another upgrade button.
But looking back, it feels like a timestamp from the beginning of a different era.
At that time, a lot of developers were still mocking AI.
Not questioning it carefully. Not testing it seriously. Not studying where it could help or where it could fail.
Mocking it.
And, of course, the internet followed. Influencers, writers, journalists, photographers, programmers, and creators repeated the same line: AI was theft, AI was garbage, AI was a threat, AI was a toy, AI was for lazy people, AI was the end of creativity.
In some online communities, especially places like Bluesky, even talking positively about AI could be enough to get you added to block lists. That is how strong the rejection was.
If you were curious about AI, you learned quickly to use it quietly.
You tested it. You learned from it. You built with it.
But you did not always talk about it.
Because the risk was not technical. It was social.
You could be labeled before people even asked what you were building.
But my interest in AI did not begin in 2023.
It started around 2008.
I remember a conversation with a programmer friend who had a very different kind of vision. He was not talking about AI generating images, videos, books, or viral content. He was not describing the flashy things that would later dominate social media.
He talked about AI as a tool for developers.
A tool for researchers.
A tool for medicine.
A tool for people who needed to process complexity faster.
At the time, it sounded almost invisible to most people. Not exciting in the way the internet likes things to be exciting. No magic image. No robot writing a poem. No dramatic demo.
Just the possibility that machines could help smart people do difficult work better.
That conversation stayed with me.
So when AI finally arrived in a practical form, I did not see it as an invasion.
I saw it as something I had been waiting for.
And what impressed me most about that friend was not only that he understood the potential early. It was that he was not afraid of it.
He did not talk like someone terrified of losing his job.
He did not talk like someone worried that “anyone with AI” would replace real developers.
He saw the tool before the panic.
That is rare.
Fast-forward a couple of years, and the tone has changed.
A lot.
Many of the same developers and influencers who once dismissed AI are now using it every day. And they are not just using the free versions or the basic $20 plans.
They are paying $200 a month.
Some even say openly that if the tool cost $500 a month, they would still pay without blinking.
That is not a small shift.
That is a public surrender to reality.
And to be clear: I do not say this to mock them. Changing your mind is not a weakness. In technology, changing your mind is often a survival skill.
The problem was never that people were skeptical.
Skepticism is healthy.
The problem was arrogance.
The problem was watching a major technological shift happen in real time and deciding, without serious testing, that it was only hype.
AI is not perfect. It makes mistakes. It can hallucinate. It can produce shallow work if guided poorly. It can create noise. It can be misused. It can make bad developers faster at writing bad code.
But none of that changes the fact that it is useful.
Deeply useful.
For developers, it can accelerate debugging, refactoring, documentation, architecture planning, code exploration, tests, deployment scripts, database work, and product iteration.
For writers, it can help structure ideas, challenge weak paragraphs, create outlines, expand drafts, and reduce the loneliness of the blank page.
For founders, it can turn vague ideas into prototypes.
For designers, it can explore directions faster.
For researchers, it can summarize, compare, extract, and organize information.
AI does not remove the need for skill.
It amplifies the person using it.
That is the part many people missed.
They thought the question was: “Will AI replace me?”
A better question was: “What happens when someone with my skills uses AI better than I do?”
That is where the real pressure comes from.
Not from a beginner writing one prompt.
Not from a magic chatbot replacing an entire profession overnight.
The real competition is another competent person who decided to adapt faster.
That person can now build more, test more, learn more, ship more, and recover from mistakes faster.
If you spend all your energy fighting the existence of the tool, while someone else spends that same energy learning how to use it well, the gap will not stay small.
It will grow.
And later, when the job market changes, when teams shrink, when expectations rise, when one developer is expected to do what used to require three people, it will be tempting to say:
“I lost my job because of AI.”
Maybe.
But maybe you lost it because you underestimated reality.
That sounds harsh, but technology has never cared much about emotional timing.
The web did not wait for print people to feel comfortable.
Streaming did not wait for television executives.
Smartphones did not wait for desktop software.
Digital cameras did not wait for film.
And AI will not wait for developers, writers, designers, journalists, or creators to finish debating whether it should exist.
It exists.
The only serious question now is what you are going to do with it.
You can criticize it. You should. You can demand better ethics, better attribution, better safety, better transparency, better tools, better rules.
But criticism without practice becomes theater.
If you work in technology or creativity and you are still refusing to learn AI, you are not protecting your craft.
You may be protecting your comfort.
And comfort is expensive.
I say this as someone who loves building, writing, coding, and creating. AI did not make my ideas less mine. It helped me finish ideas that had been stuck for years.
It helped me move faster.
It helped me think through architecture.
It helped me debug.
It helped me write.
It helped me build websites, apps, stories, tools, experiments, and systems that would have taken much longer before.
It did not replace my curiosity.
It rewarded it.
That is why the old anti-AI posture feels so outdated now.
The same people who once laughed at AI are now quietly using it. Some are paying premium prices. Some are building workflows around it. Some are integrating it into their companies, their products, their writing, their code, and their daily work.
The block lists did not stop the future.
The jokes did not stop the models.
The moral panic did not stop the tools from becoming useful.
And now the conversation has changed from “AI is useless” to “Which model are you using?” and “Is the $200 plan worth it?”
That is a remarkable transformation.
The lesson is simple:
Do not confuse early limitations with permanent limits.
Do not confuse public opinion with technical reality.
And do not confuse fear with wisdom.
AI is not magic.
But it is leverage.
And in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, leverage changes everything.
The people who understand that are not waiting anymore.
They are building.
They are learning.
They are shipping.
They are becoming faster while others are still arguing with the calendar.
You do not have to love every part of this new era.
You do not have to trust every company.
You do not have to accept every use case.
But if you are a developer, creator, writer, journalist, designer, or entrepreneur, you should at least be honest enough to test the tool before declaring it useless.
Because the future does not need your permission.
And by the time everyone agrees it is real, the advantage will already belong to the people who started learning when it was still unpopular.