OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared in a social media post that the company has now fixed ChatGPT’s overuse of the “em dash,” which is the extra-long hyphen that’s commonly seen in AI-generated text.
In the past, ChatGPT was overzealous in its use of the em dash, to the point where it’d continue to include them even when users asked it not to. Now, with the fix, a user can instruct ChatGPT to not use em dashes and it will respect the instruction.
“Small-but-happy win,” Altman writes in his post. “If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it’s supposed to do!” ChatGPT will continue to use em dashes per usual if no instruction is given. That part hasn’t changed.
The AI chatbot’s fondness for the em dash has been so prevalent in its responses that many have (misguidedly) begun to see it as a surefire sign that a text was generated using an AI tool.
