Three Years for a Hyphen: Is This OpenAI's Idea of Progress, or Just a Bad Joke?
Alright, let's talk about priorities. OpenAI, the company that wants to usher in Artificial General Intelligence, just announced a "fix" for ChatGPT's annoying obsession with the em dash. A punctuation mark. It took them three years. Seriously, three years to get their AI to stop splattering what some folks are now calling the "ChatGPT hyphen" all over the internet. Sam Altman himself, Mr. Future-of-Humanity, tweets about it like it’s some monumental achievement, calling it a "small-but-happy win." Forget AGI—Sam Altman celebrates ChatGPT finally following em dash formatting rules - Ars Technica Small? Happy? Give me a break. What the hell does this tell us about the real distance to AGI, if the very basics of language still stump them for years? It ain't exactly inspiring confidence, is it?
The Great Em Dash Rebellion, Finally Quelled (Maybe)
For years, anyone who's ever tried to get ChatGPT to write something without a flurry of these elongated hyphens knows the struggle. You'd tell it, "No em dashes, please." It'd nod, then crank out a paragraph that looked like a picket fence of punctuation. Writers, god bless 'em, started getting accused of using AI because their own, perfectly natural use of an em dash was suddenly tainted. It became a telltale sign, a digital scarlet letter, signaling "bot-generated." Sam Altman says OpenAI has a fix for a telltale sign that you used ChatGPT - Business Insider And offcourse, many writers were already using them long before AI became a thing; it's a perfectly legitimate tool in the right hands. But now? Now it's a problem. Some folks are even ditching the punctuation entirely, fearing their perfectly human prose will be mistaken for the output of some glorified word-mashing algorithm. That's a real consequence, not some "small win."
OpenAI says they've tuned GPT-5.1 to actually listen to custom instructions. So, if you really want to avoid the em dash, you gotta go into your personalization settings and tell it there. Don't expect it to just know. It's not a default fix. My friends, that's like saying your self-driving car can finally stay in its lane, but only if you manually input the lane-keeping command every single time you start the engine. What a feat of engineering! Altman's X post got mixed reactions, as you'd expect. Some folks are just plain skeptical, wondering why something so "simple" took longer than it takes to get a bachelor's degree. And they're not wrong to ask. If this is where their "ongoing efforts to make ChatGPT more customizable" are focused, after three years, then what are we really talking about here? Are we building Skynet or just a slightly less annoying spellchecker?
The Ghost in the Machine, or Just a Very Dumb Parrot?
The official line is that LLMs are probabilistic. They just spit out patterns from their training data. Apparently, 19th-century books, which were heavy on the em dash, might be partly to blame. Or maybe it was just a popular habit picked up from blogging sites. Whatever the reason, this thing, this powerful AI that's supposed to revolutionize everything, couldn't stop using a specific punctuation mark. It couldn't follow a direct, simple instruction in chat. It "stumped OpenAI for some time."
Think about that for a second. We're talking about a system that can generate coherent articles, write code, pass exams, and yet it's like trying to teach a hyper-intelligent parrot not to caw at sunrise. It just does what it's statistically inclined to do. This isn't about understanding; it's about shifting probabilities. They want us to believe this is a stepping stone to AGI, but it feels more like they're still struggling with basic motor control. It's like building a rocket ship that can orbit Mars, but the engineers can't figure out why the onboard coffee machine keeps brewing decaf when they explicitly asked for espresso. They keep tweaking the "coffee probability weights," I guess.
This whole thing just makes you wonder: if a simple instruction like "no em dashes" is such a Herculean task, what about truly complex, nuanced ethical or safety instructions? How much trust can we place in these models when they can't even get punctuation right without years of tinkering and a special "custom instruction" bypass? And what other "telltale signs," like the clichéd phrases ChatGPT loves, are we just going to have to live with? Because let's be real, if it took three years to fix the dash, how long until it stops sounding like a corporate press release written by a very enthusiastic, but ultimately soulless, intern? Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here for expecting a computer to act like it actually understands language, instead of just mimicking it.
