How did we go from Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare to 'the ChatGPT hyphen'?
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Is chat GPT killing the M dash
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Generative AI is doing a lot of harm. Environmental, privacy-related, even potentially affecting the brain activity
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of those who use it all too often. So the potential demise of a punctuation mark
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may seem to pale in comparison, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't matter
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In typography, an M is a measuring unit. So an M dash is literally a dash that is one M long
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The punctuation mark has been used for centuries in English, shaping playwriting, prose and poetry
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You can famously find it in the poems of Emily Dickinson, in Shakespeare, Laurence Stern, Virginia Woolf, you name it
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The list is long and impressive. Today, the M-Dash is mostly used in writing to elaborate on thoughts, give examples, add supplementary information, explain or expand on an idea
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However, lately, the excessive use of mdashes has been cited as one of the main giveaways
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that a text may be written by ChatGPT. In fact, ChatGPT generates so many mdashes that some Gen Z users have been referring
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to it as a ChatGPT hyphen. I rarely use ChatGPT, and when I do, it's never to generate text
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And yet, I have caught myself editing mdashes out of my writing, swapping it for commas
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or other punctuation marks, sometimes even completely changing the initial structure of my sentences
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And I really have a problem with this. I believe that the way a person writes tells us a lot about their thought process
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And the M in particular with its poses its hesitations and interjections mirrors real human speech to me And so I hate the idea that an AI platform that has been trained on human writing will ironically force people to change
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the way they write. And it's not just about self-censoring. In a piece for The Guardian
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journalist and fellow M-dash lover James Shackle writes about receiving an email from his editor
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that called journalists to stop using M-dashes in their writing to avoid AI accusations
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But why is OpenAI's platform using so many M-dashes in the first place
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Here's what Sam Oatman said when asked about it. You know, we have this team that figures out
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what the model's personality should be like and how it should behave. And a lot of users like M-dashes
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So we had more M-dashes. And now I think we have too many M-dashes. But that's the answer
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It was just like, users liked it. We put more in. Generative AI feeds on pre-existing texts written by humans
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journalists, writers, bloggers, academics, anything it has access to. And so if humans use a certain punctuation mark a lot, the AI will too
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Following considerable backlash and quite a lot of memes, in November 2025, Othman announced that OpenAI had fixed its M-problem
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by adding a custom option to prompt ChatGPT not to use them
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We're yet to see if the company will phase out its now-characteristic M-dash
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If it does, in a few years' time, the ChatGPT hyphen may become a distant memory of the past
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and we can all go back to using M-dashes without thinking of AI. Until then, please keep using the M-dash
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There are other and more reliable ways to tell if your text was written by AI
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and I would really hate to see the M-dash go
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