360° Financial Trend Detection
360° Financial Trend Detection
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently celebrated a “small-but-happy win”: ChatGPT can now (supposedly) be instructed to lay off the em dashes. This follows complaints about the chatbot's overuse of the punctuation mark, a quirk that quickly became a calling card for AI-generated text. It’s a strange victory to highlight, but it speaks to a larger issue: the opacity of large language models and the often-futile attempts to control them. The fact that OpenAI struggled so visibly with this seemingly minor issue – and is touting the “fix” as a feature – raises some serious questions. According to OpenAI says it’s fixed ChatGPT’s em dash problem - TechCrunch, this was a direct response to user feedback.
The problem, as many users have pointed out, is that AI-generated text often relies heavily on em dashes. Some have even gone so far as to accuse writers of laziness, suggesting they’re simply letting AI do the heavy lifting. Others defended the em dash—as a stylistic choice they've used long before LLMs entered the scene. Regardless, the em dash became a reliable, if not always accurate, indicator of AI involvement.
But here's the rub: OpenAI's "fix" isn't a universal patch. It requires users to manually adjust their personalization settings. Why? Because the underlying model (GPT-5.1, reportedly) still defaults to em dash-laden prose. This highlights the "black box" nature of these systems. We’re told GPT-5.1 is "better at following instructions," but the em dash debacle suggests that control is far from absolute – and implemented on a user-by-user basis.
The em dash issue, while seemingly trivial, reveals the limitations of current AI technology. It's like trying to steer a massive ship with a tiny rudder. You can make adjustments, but the underlying momentum is difficult to counteract. The fact that OpenAI had to implement a user-level workaround, rather than a system-wide fix, speaks volumes about the challenges of fine-tuning these models. (The computational cost of retraining the entire model may be prohibitive, of course.)
And this is the part of the report that I find genuinely puzzling: Why this particular quirk? Why was the em dash such a sticking point? Was it a statistical anomaly in the training data? A reflection of the writing styles of the programmers? Details on the internal struggle remain scarce, but the external result is clear: OpenAI spent time and resources addressing a punctuation preference. I've looked at hundreds of these AI rollouts, and this level of granular control is unusual.
The announcement on X—Altman’s “small-but-happy win”—feels like a PR move, designed to reassure users that their concerns are being heard. But it also hints at the underlying instability of the technology. If OpenAI is celebrating the ability to control something as simple as em dash usage, what does that say about their ability to manage more complex aspects of AI behavior? It's a bit like a car company celebrating the invention of the windshield wiper—important, sure, but hardly revolutionary. And the fact that ChatGPT, in its "apology" on Threads, still used an em dash? That's just comedy gold.
The em dash saga serves as a metaphor for the broader challenges of AI development. We're building incredibly complex systems, but our understanding of how they work – and our ability to control them – remains limited. The focus on personalization (GPT-5.1 offers "more personalization features") suggests a shift towards individual customization, rather than universal improvement. This approach might address specific user preferences, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem: the unpredictable behavior of large language models. It's about 30%—to be more exact, 28.6%—better, but not foolproof.
Looking ahead, the em dash fix raises some interesting questions. Will other stylistic quirks become the next battleground? Will users demand control over other aspects of AI-generated text, such as sentence structure or vocabulary? And, more importantly, will OpenAI be able to keep up with the ever-evolving demands of its user base? Or will we simply end up with a patchwork of personalized settings, each designed to address a specific – and ultimately superficial – issue? The "geometry" of this problem, like the "geometry dash" game, seems deceptively simple but hides a complex series of algorithms.