Em dashes have become what many believe to be a telltale sign of AI-generated text over the past few years. The punctuation mark appears frequently in outputs from ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, sometimes to the point where readers believe they can identify AI writing by its overuse alone—although people can overuse it, too.
On Thursday evening, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that ChatGPT has started following custom instructions to avoid using em dashes. “Small-but-happy win: If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it’s supposed to do!” he wrote.
I give it a few weeks tops before it starts inserting them even more aggressively than before because of the AI equivalent of incest and then they have to scramble to add a hard rule making them unable to do emdashes. All while Altman cries from how pathetic of a “man” he is.
Sure! I will try in a few–weeks!