You ever read something and instantly go, “oh yeah… ChatGPT definitely wrote this”?
Yeah. Blame the em dashes.
For the past year, that long dramatic line has basically been the AI equivalent of leaving fingerprints at a crime scene. We’re talking school essays, work emails, even customer service replies.
And the funniest part? Even when you told it not to use them, it was like, “Totally got you — anyway—” and just kept going. It got so ridiculous, that actual humans who genuinely LIKE em dashes started getting side‑eyed…
But plot twist: OpenAI finally fixed it.
Sam Altman hopped on X calling it a “small‑but‑happy win.”
Translation: they finally realized the internet was tired of ChatGPT’s punctuation personality disorder.
So here's the core change: Custom Instructions now actually work the way they were supposed to from day one.
Before the update, the AI was punctuation feral — ignoring user preferences, doing its own thing, and leaving every document looking suspiciously uniform.
Now?
When you say “No em dashes,” it listens.
When you ask for a different vibe, it follows it.
Want clean, human-looking writing? Boom, you actually get it, along with all the tiny stylistic quirks that make your writing feel like you and not a polite alien trying its best.
And the setup is stupid easy.
Just open Settings, hit Custom Instructions and tell ChatGPT exactly how you want your punctuation to behave.
You can ban em dashes entirely, swap them for commas, force periods — whatever fits your style. Save it once, and the fix sticks across everything you generate moving forward.
But zoom out for a sec, because this update is actually way bigger than a punctuation tweak.
It’s a sign that AI writing is finally moving past that old robotic default voice into something more personal, customizable, and human. The goal was never to give everyone one universal ChatGPT tone — it’s to make the tool blend seamlessly into your workflow without screaming “AI wrote this.”
And if we want AI to feel like a tool instead of a tell, this kind of control isn’t optional — it’s essential.
So yeah — the em dash era is officially optional now. Retire it. Embrace it. Switch it up depending on your mood.
At least ChatGPT finally learned how to listen.
