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OpenAI says it’s fixed ChatGPT’s em-dash problem – November 2025

Author/Source: Kyle Wiggers See the full link here

Takeaway

This article reports that OpenAI has resolved a long-standing issue where ChatGPT frequently misused or overused em-dashes in its generated text. The fix aims to improve the overall quality, naturalness, and grammatical correctness of the AI’s written output, making it more reliable for various applications.


Technical Subject Understandability

Beginner


Analogy/Comparison

Imagine a brilliant new chef who, despite cooking delicious food, always sprinkles too much salt on every dish. The fix is like teaching the chef to use the right amount of salt, or a different seasoning, so that every meal is perfectly balanced and enjoyable without any distracting elements.


Why It Matters

This correction significantly enhances the professionalism and readability of AI-generated content, which is crucial as more people use AI for writing tasks. For example, a student using ChatGPT to help draft an essay or a marketing professional creating ad copy will now receive cleaner, more polished text that requires less manual editing for punctuation errors, saving time and improving output quality.


Related Terms

Em-dash
Large language model (LLM)
Tokenization

Jargon Conversion:
Em-dash: A long dash (—) used in writing to indicate a sudden break in thought, an emphatic pause, or to set off a parenthetical remark. It’s longer than a hyphen or an en-dash.
Large language model (LLM): An artificial intelligence program trained on a massive amount of text data to understand, generate, and process human language. ChatGPT is an example of an LLM.
Tokenization: The process by which an AI model breaks down input text into smaller units, called “tokens,” which can be words, parts of words, or punctuation marks, for processing.

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