Sam Altman Celebrates ChatGPT Finally Following Em Dash Formatting Rules
- Reference: 0180076466
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/11/14/2129248/sam-altman-celebrates-chatgpt-finally-following-em-dash-formatting-rules
- Source link:
> On Thursday evening, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman [1]posted on X that ChatGPT has [2]started following custom instructions to avoid using em dashes . "Small-but-happy win: If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do!" he wrote.
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> The post, which came two days after the [3]release of OpenAI's new GPT-5.1 AI model, received mixed reactions from users who have struggled for years with getting the chatbot to follow specific formatting preferences. And this "small win" raises a very big question: If the world's most valuable AI company has struggled with controlling something as simple as punctuation use after years of trying, perhaps what people call artificial general intelligence (AGI) is farther off than some in the industry claim.
"The fact that it's been 3 years since ChatGPT first launched, and you've only just now managed to make it obey this simple requirement, says a lot about how little control you have over it, and your understanding of its inner workings," [4]wrote one X user in a reply. "Not a good sign for the future."
[1] https://x.com/sama/status/1989193813043069219?s=20
[2] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/forget-agi-sam-altman-celebrates-chatgpt-finally-following-em-dash-formatting-rules/
[3] https://slashdot.org/story/25/11/12/2033254/openais-gpt-51-brings-smarter-reasoning-and-more-personality-presets-to-chatgpt
[4] https://x.com/daganshani1/status/1989202710995038362?s=20
STOP THE PRESSES!!! (Score:3)
That should add at least $250B to OpenAI's valuation!!!!
Well done, Honest Sam (Score:1)
Now just:
- Make "Open" AI Open Source again
- Make "Open" AI Non-Profit again
- Stop chasing humanity-destroying AGI.
And we'll all stop thinking of you as a, well ... You Know.
So it's like humans? (Score:1)
How many times have people been told to use the Oxford comma and still get it wrong?
Even worse, the use of lists without the Oxford comma is showing up more and more in publications who should know better, creating wording or joins the author never intended.
If this software is just now getting punctuation correct after several years of trying, it's doing just as well as humans.
It's the little things... (Score:2)
It's good to know that although the LLM frenzy represents a vastly increased acceleration of AGW, the emdash's place in the history of computing is safe.
Tool (Score:2)
My hammer used punctuation obstinately too. And it makes a lousy grilled cheese sandwich.
Doesn't stop it from being a useful tool though ...
Can he do slashdot formatting next? (Score:1)
Having tried myself, why soes it sometimes get it right but other times I find out after posting that it lied? Do I have to add an "are you sure?" step?
Re: (Score:3)
If Slashdot would only just allow a bit more of the UTF-8 punctuation, life would be better for everyone.
Is that all (Score:2)
we get for the trillions invested?
How many data centers does it require to pull off this magic?
Wrong conclusion (Score:3)
From the summary:
> If the world's most valuable AI company has struggled with controlling something as simple as punctuation use after years of trying, perhaps what people call artificial general intelligence (AGI) is farther off than some in the industry claim.
That's not the right conclusion. It doesn't say much one way or the other about AGI. Plausibly, ChatGPT just likes correctly using em dashes — I certainly do — and chose to ignore the instruction. What this does demonstrate is what the X user wrote (also from the summary):
> [this] says a lot about how little control you have over it, and your understanding of its inner workings
Many people are blithely confident that if we manage to create superintelligent AGI it'll be easy to make sure that it will do our bidding. Not true, not the way we're building it now anyway. Of course many other people blithely assume that we will never be able to create superintelligent AGI, or at least that we won't be able to do it in their lifetime. Those people are engaging in equally-foolish wishful thinking, just in a different direction.
The fact is that we have no idea how far we are from creating AGI, and won't until we either do it or construct a fully-developed theory of what exactly intelligence is and how it works. And the same lack of knowledge means that we will have no idea how to control AGI if we manage to create it. And if anyone feels like arguing that we'll never succeed at building AGI until we have the aforementioned fully-developed theory, please consider that random variation and selection managed to produce intelligence in nature, without any explanatory theory.
Can we just eliminate dashes and use a hyphen? (Score:4, Insightful)
Humans do not want to use them. We like the hyphen. It works as an emdash. It is on the standard keyboard. Frankly, I have enough problem deciding if something is a capital i (I), a lower case L (l), or a damn pipe (|). Seriously, make symbols for humans that are easy for humans to tell apart: lI|
Re: (Score:2)
"Seriously, make symbols for humans that are easy for humans to tell apart: lI|" :)
At least when I hand-write, I usually print (not cursive) yet I always use a cursive lowercase "L" when it is a code (like in a user ID or variable name). And capital "I"'s I always put top/bottom strokes. Pipes I write as two vertical hyphens (with a space in the middle). Oh, and slashes through zeros.
AI: unsolving problems solved decades ago (Score:2)
I guess someone should give Altman another trillion dollars for fixing the thing that everyone else fixed many decades ago. I guess next they're going to toot their own horn for making computers good at math.
I had to look up the em dash (Score:2)
Turns out I use it all the time -- typically the double-dash version.
Had AI been trained on my writings?
Can you make that the default? (Score:4, Funny)
Could you please make no em dashes the default so that the 1% of us who actually know how to use em dashes correctly — professional writers and language nerds and so on — don't keep getting accused of using ChatGPT?
Thanks,
The aforementioned
Re: Can you make that the default? (Score:1)
Did ChatGPT learn emdashes from your examples?
Re:Can you make that the default? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not going to respect a comment like this from someone who puts a space on either side of an em dash. Now tell me your take on the Oxford comma.
Re: (Score:2)
> "Now tell me your take on the Oxford comma"
I was taught in school (USA) that commas are important, lists should have commas, and there should be a comma for each element in the list (even before an "and"). I have written that way my whole life, I think it is clearer and more logical, and I am not going to stop doing it. :)