GPT-3 Explained: Why There Are So Many AI Copywriting Tools

From Elon Musk's Side Project to a Billion-Dollar AI Engine

If you've been paying any attention to the marketing and content space over the past couple of years, you've probably noticed an explosion of AI copywriting tools. Jasper, Copy.ai, Copysmith, Writesonic, Rytr — the list keeps growing. And the pricing is all over the map, from dirt-cheap lifetime deals to enterprise subscriptions costing thousands per year. So what's actually going on?

It all traces back to OpenAI, a research lab co-founded by Elon Musk and a handful of other tech heavyweights back in 2015. The original mission was noble enough: develop AI that benefits humanity. But things shifted fast. Musk left the board in 2018 over conflicts with Tesla's own AI work, and by 2019, OpenAI had transitioned from a non-profit to a for-profit entity — quickly signing a billion-dollar partnership with Microsoft.

Then in June 2020, while the world was locked down, OpenAI announced GPT-3 — a language model trained on trillions of words scraped from the internet. More importantly, they released a public API, which is the connector that now powers virtually every AI copywriting tool you see on the market.

What Makes GPT-3 Such a Big Deal

To understand why GPT-3 changed everything, you need some context. Before it arrived, the largest language model was Microsoft's Turing NLG, which handled 17 billion machine learning parameters. That was already impressive — billions of anything is a lot. Then GPT-3 showed up with 175 billion parameters, a 10x leap that happened in just a few months.

The output quality is genuinely remarkable. GPT-3 can answer questions in natural language, translate between languages, and generate coherent, persuasive text that's difficult to distinguish from human writing. It's particularly strong at creative and persuasive copy — skills that only a small percentage of people have developed professionally.

That said, it's not perfect. GPT-3 struggles with factual accuracy, which is something humans find easy but language models find surprisingly hard. It's great at sounding convincing, less great at being correct. Still, like drum machines and Auto-Tune before it, this technology isn't going anywhere. Whether you embrace it or not, AI-generated content is already part of the landscape.

The API: Why All These Tools Exist (and Differ)

Here's the key thing to understand: almost every AI copywriting tool on the market is built on top of the same OpenAI API. They're all connecting to GPT-3. So the natural question is — if they're all using the same underlying technology, why not just buy the cheapest one?

It's not that simple. The OpenAI API offers several different engines — DaVinci, Curie, Babbage, and Ada — each with different capabilities and different price points. DaVinci is generally the most capable, but it's also the most expensive for developers to use. The engine a tool connects to, how it structures its prompts, and how it processes the output — that's the secret sauce that differentiates one product from another.

So when you use Jasper versus Copy.ai versus Writesonic, you're getting different developer teams' interpretations of how to best leverage the API. Some might use DaVinci for headline generation but a cheaper engine for body copy. Others might invest more in prompt engineering to get better results from less expensive engines. How well a team navigates these trade-offs directly impacts the quality of what you get back.

Why Lifetime Deals on AI Tools Are Risky

This is where the pricing question gets really interesting — and where a lot of deal hunters need to pay attention. Every time you generate copy with one of these tools, the developer behind it is paying OpenAI for that API request. The more you use the tool, the more it costs them.

Now imagine you bought a $39 lifetime deal for an AI copywriting tool. At first, you're a great customer. But over time, as you keep generating content month after month, you flip from being profitable to being a liability. You're costing the company more than you ever paid them. Multiply that by thousands of users, and you can see the problem.

The company then has a few options: upsell you to a paid plan, introduce usage limits, or hope you simply stop using the product. If enough lifetime deal users stick around and keep generating content, the company eventually can't cover its API bills. This is why, for AI tools specifically, a lifetime deal is probably not the wisest investment. Monthly recurring revenue isn't just a business preference for these companies — it's a survival requirement.

What to Look for When Choosing an AI Writing Tool

So if you can't just grab the cheapest option and call it a day, what should you actually evaluate? The real differentiator comes down to how well each tool's developers have built the layer between you and GPT-3. That means looking at the user experience, the quality of output for your specific use cases, and whether the tool is built sustainably enough to stick around.

Key things worth evaluating include how useful the tool is for long-form blog content, how well it handles long-form sales copy, and whether it can produce quality shorter content like social media posts. Plagiarism checking is also critical — you want to make sure the output comes back as original and isn't just regurgitating existing content from its training data.

Beyond that, consider the template library, integrations with your existing workflow, and overall value relative to what you're paying. The spread between a sub-$50 tool and one charging thousands per year is enormous, and the right choice depends entirely on your volume of output and how central AI writing is to your content strategy. Like any tool that's replaced a manual process — from chainsaws replacing axes to self-checkout lanes replacing cashiers — GPT-3 is reshaping how content gets made. It's worth understanding, even if you ultimately decide it's not for you.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.