OpenAI says ChatGPT will now stop using em dashes if you tell it to. The telltale sign that supposedly signals text written by AI has popped up everywhere in recent months. It has appeared in school papers, emails, comments, customer service chats, LinkedIn posts, online forums, ad copy, and more. The inclusion of the em dash has led people to criticize writers for being lazy and turning to an AI chatbot to do their work.
Of course, many have also defended the em dash, saying it has been a part of their writing style well before large language models adopted the punctuation. However, the fact that chatbots could not seem to avoid using it made the so-called “ChatGPT hyphen” a newly objectionable addition to any text, even if it was not a reliable signal of content created by generative AI.
This problem had stumped OpenAI for some time. ChatGPT users were unable to get the chatbot to stop using the symbol, even when they specifically asked it not to.
Now, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the company has fixed the problem. In a post on X, Altman writes that if you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it is supposed to do. He called the update a small-but-happy win.
The company explains in a post on Threads that ChatGPT will be better at not using the em dash if you instruct it not to via the custom instructions in your personalization settings. That means it will not necessarily eliminate the em dash from its output by default, but you will at least have more control over the frequency of its appearance.