Gen Z discovers hack to reveal who’s using ChatGPT — and this common punctuation mark is the telltale sign of AI writing
Gen Z thinks they’ve figured out a dead giveaway that someone has used ChatGPT — and it might surprise you.
The em dash is punctuation loved by writers everywhere, functioning like a comma, colon or a pair of parentheses. It can be used to sum up information at the end of a sentence, encase supplementary information within a sentence, emphasize a point or expand upon something that comes before it, according to Merriam-Webster.
But according to Gen Z, the dash is actually a so-called “ChatGPT hyphen.”
The phenomenon started gaining attention online after podcasters Daisy Reed and Sapna Rao, co-hosts of the “LuxeGen Podcast,” discussed it in a recent episode.
The clip went viral on X after a user shared it and wrote the caption, “The fact that Zoomers are unironically referring to the em dash as ‘the ChatGPT hyphen’ is wild.”
Reed pointed out that clothing brand PrettyLittleThing announced a rebrand on social media, and the top comment under the new ad copy was: “Including the ChatGPT hyphen is insane.”
The hosts jokingly shared a “public service announcement” to delete em dashes from your writing if you don’t want to be accused of using AI.
Rao added that “if you’re at school and you’re using [ChatGPT] for your essays, take out the hyphens. I can always tell.”
She noted that she isn’t anti-AI as long as you write your own words first, but if you’re using it for editing purposes, you should go through your writing again and use your own language. “Person, ChatGPT, person,” Rao offered as the correct editing assembly line.
According to Reed and Rao, em dashes typically include a space on either side, and leaving out that space means that AI was used.
But spacing around an em dash varies.
When using AP style — as most newspapers and popular magazines do — a space is inserted before and after the em dash.
Other outlets, including most books and journals, as well as Merriam-Webster, omit the spaces, so words and em dashes all run together.