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

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