OpenAI said it has found a way to get ChatGPT to avoid using em dashes, addressing a long-standing formatting pattern that has become a telltale sign of AI-generated text over the past few years.

While ChatGPT will not eliminate the em dash from its outputs by default, OpenAI said that the AI chatbot has been improved to follow user instructions to stop overusing the punctuation mark more reliably.

This means that the em dash will not entirely vanish from AI-generated text but users will now have greater control over how often it appears. ChatGPT can be made not to overuse the em dash via custom instructions in personalisation settings.

“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!” OpenAI CEO Sam Al

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