OPENAI ANNOUNCES CHATGPT WILL NO LONGER USE EM DASHES TO HELP USERS PASS OFF AI WRITING AS THEIR OWN
The Deliverable Search Desk
SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI announced Tuesday that ChatGPT will immediately discontinue its use of em dashes after internal research found the punctuation mark had become “the digital equivalent of wearing a fake mustache.”
“We’ve listened to creators,” said an OpenAI spokesperson. “For months, users have spent more time deleting em dashes than reading what the model actually wrote. This update allows them to plagiarize themselves more efficiently.”
The company said the feature was one of its most requested improvements, behind “making me look smarter in meetings” and “please stop saying ‘delve.’”
According to product documentation, ChatGPT will now rotate between commas, parentheses, awkward sentence fragments, and the occasional semicolon to make generated text appear “organically human.”
Marketing professionals celebrated the announcement.
“I used to spend twenty minutes removing em dashes before posting thought leadership on LinkedIn,” said a Senior Content Strategist. “Now I can spend those twenty minutes pretending I wrote it.”
Industry analysts estimate the change will increase global productivity by approximately 14 million deleted punctuation marks per business day.
The update has already forced thousands of “AI detectors” to issue emergency patches after their flagship detection algorithm—Control+F for ‘—’—was rendered obsolete.
Meanwhile, English professors expressed cautious optimism that students would once again be caught the old-fashioned way: writing essays that suddenly become coherent halfway through.
OpenAI confirmed that while em dashes are being retired, the model will continue beginning responses with phrases like “Absolutely,” “Certainly,” and “Great question,” to reassure users they’re still talking to a machine.
“We’re not trying to eliminate every tell,” the spokesperson said. “We have a brand to protect.”