Writers complained that the chatbot's overuse of em dashes made them avoid the punctuation in their own writing. Other ChatGPT users had trouble getting the tool to stop using them.

Controlling punctuation is a main concern for users who depend on ChatGPT for professional, academic, or publishing tasks.

A debate surrounds the em dash, dubbed the 'ChatGPT hyphen'. Gen Z and social media users link it to AI content. However, literary figures like Jane Austen used it too. Its presence in AI stems from ...

In a new personalization update, OpenAI says that ChatGPT will now respect your instruction to avoid using em-dashes when set in custom preferences. This might look trivial, but it marks a deeper ...

Novelist Cormac McCarthy has spent twenty years editing what feels like the opposite of a novel: scientific papers by faculty members and postdocs at the Santa Fe Institute. Some of the scientists he ...

It’s rare that a punctuation mark becomes grist for the online rumor mill. But recently, an uptick in focus on AI and its impacts has brought a Blake Lively-esque level of attention to the em dash, ...

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been giving this note to my editing clients: “Replace floating hyphen with proper em dash.” It comes up when I’m proofreading images, like PDFs, and I see a hyphen ...