OpenAI says it’s fixed ChatGPT’s em dash problem

OpenAI says ChatGPT will now ditch the em dashes if you tell it to. The telltale sign that supposedly signals text written by AI has popped up everywhere in recent months, including 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 those writers for being lazy and turning to an AI chatbot to do their work.

Of course, many have also argued for the em dash, saying it’s been a part of their writing well before LLMs adopted the punctuation. However, the fact that chatbots couldn’t seem to avoid its use made the so-called “ChatGPT hyphen” a newly objectionable addition to any text, even if they weren’t a reliable signal of content created by generative AI.

The problem had stumped OpenAI for some time, as 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, “If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it’s supposed to do,” calling the update a “small-but-happy win.”

The company explains in a post on Threads (where it forced ChatGPT to apologize for “ruining the em dash”) 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 won’t necessarily eliminate the em dash from its output by default, but you will at least have more control over the frequency of its appearance.