‘Can we work out a deal where you pay ME and I get no AI at all?’ Meta wants you to pay for more AI — one brutal response suggests people might rather pay to make it go away
Meta One may be the opposite of what people want
by https://www.techradar.com/author/eric-hal-schwartz · TechRadarFeatures By Eric Hal Schwartz Published 17 September 2026
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Meta has a new proposition for anyone who looks at Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp and thinks they could use a little more artificial intelligence. Meta One, launched this week, packages additional features with expanded access to some of the company’s most compute-intensive AI tools.
Pay $7.99 a month for Core and you can generate more images and videos, use Instagram’s AI Restyle tools more often and generally enjoy a larger serving of Meta AI. Premium costs $19.99 and provides even more tokens.
The core Meta experience remains free, while subscriptions allow the company to build specialized or expensive features for people willing to pay for them.
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Horror author Joe Hill had another idea, posting on the Meta-owned Threads: “That’s sweet, so pay a fee, get more AI, pay nothing, get a little less AI. Can we work out a deal where you pay ME and I get no AI at all?”
It is a very good joke. It may also be an unexpectedly good piece of product strategy.
Post by @joe_hill View on Threads
A lot of companies have settled on the assumption that more AI is inherently worth more money. Chatbot subscriptions offer higher limits and access to more capable models. Meta One follows the same logic by adding AI generation behind its Core and Premium tiers, though the bundles include plenty of non-AI extras too.
But while some people may want more AI and are prepared to pay for it, it's not a universal desire. Hill’s response gets at the other half of the equation, where the people who increasingly encounter AI inside products they already use would quite like a large, clearly labeled switch that makes it disappear.
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