OpenAI Celebrates Controlling Punctuation While Raising Billions for Superintelligence

Sam Altman posted Thursday evening. Victory lap about em dashes.

ChatGPT will finally avoid those long punctuation marks if you configure custom instructions correctly. The CEO called it a "small-but-happy win" to 2.4 million X followers. This came two days after OpenAI released GPT-5.1.

Worth noting what OpenAI actually builds versus what it claims to build. The company raises billions positioning itself as humanity's path to artificial general intelligence. Systems that match or exceed human cognitive abilities across all domains. That's the pitch. Meanwhile, Altman celebrates getting the chatbot to respect punctuation preferences after three years.

Writers who actually use em dashes correctly wanted the opposite fix. One Slashdot user asked whether OpenAI could make avoiding em dashes the default, "so that the 1% of us who actually know how to use em dashes correctly don't keep getting accused of using ChatGPT." Another said they'd used em dashes their entire writing life. Now they're evidence of AI generation.

Three years of development. The achievement shifts probabilities around a punctuation mark. Call it what it is.

How Instruction-Following Actually Works

Traditional software follows instructions deterministically. Tell a program "don't include character X" and it won't. The execution is binary.

ChatGPT doesn't work that way. Every token gets selected from a probability distribution. Your custom instruction doesn't create a rule. It adds text to the prompt making certain tokens less likely during generation. Less likely isn't impossible.

Your instruction competes with everything in the training data, everything else in the prompt, the reinforcement learning that shaped behavior through human feedback. You're adding weight to one side of a statistical process involving millions of parameters.

Ars Technica's technical analysis spelled this out. Altman's celebrating that OpenAI tuned GPT-5.1 to weight custom instructions more heavily in probability calculations. No verification system checks outputs against requirements. The instruction influences statistical predictions. That's the mechanism.

Here's where it gets unstable. OpenAI updates models continuously behind the scenes, even within the same version number. Each update changes output characteristics. You fix em dash overuse through one training run. Tomorrow's update targets improved coding capabilities. The em dashes come back. Not because OpenAI wants them there. Because you're steering a statistical system with millions of competing influences, and adjusting one behavior can alter others in unintended ways.

Slashdot commenter Fallen Kell laid out the architectural reality. LLMs operate as probability matrices. They deconstruct your prompt, run statistical analysis against trained knowledge, spit out letters and words and punctuation that statistically resemble training material outputs. Until GPT-5.1, ChatGPT lacked sufficient training within its neural network to override English grammar's typed rules around em dashes in everyday conversation.

The fix required training on specific input/output cases long enough to override the base English grammar language model. That's fundamental knowledge an LLM needs to function. But training against internet content means training against garbage. Add bad input, you're stuck with the changes it made to output probabilities. One commenter put it bluntly: models effectively training against internet content are "so full of bad information that the results can never really be trusted for anything other than probability of asking a random person for the answer."

Where the Em Dash Obsession Came From

Nobody knows exactly why LLMs spam em dashes. Some theories point to 19th-century books in training data. A 2018 study found dash use peaked around 1860, then declined through the mid-20th century. Others blame automatic character conversion on Medium's platform.

Simpler explanation: LLMs spit out frequently seen patterns from training data and reinforcement learning. You ask for professional-style writing, the model gives you a smoothed average of internet samples. Em dashes show up constantly in formal writing, news articles, editorial content. The model reflects that frequency.

Could be that during reinforcement learning from human feedback, responses with em dashes got higher ratings. Evaluators thought they looked more sophisticated. Pure speculation, but it tracks.

The social damage was real. Detection tools started flagging em dash overuse. Human readers learned to spot it. Writers who'd used the punctuation correctly for years faced accusations. You're lazy. You outsourced your thinking to a chatbot. Some journalists said AI was "killing" the em dash for legitimate users.

The AGI Problem Nobody Wants to Acknowledge

One X user replied to Altman directly: "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. Not a good sign for the future."

The Slashdot thread titled "AI: unsolving problems solved decades ago" went harder. Em dashes have existed for centuries. The double-dash version has been typing standard for decades. One commenter noted using it constantly. "Had AI been trained on my writings?"

Reports keep surfacing that ChatGPT lists Joe Biden as president despite Trump's November 2024 election victory. Basic factual accuracy about current events fails. Punctuation control took three years.

OpenAI talks publicly about AGI, superintelligence, "magic intelligence in the sky" while raising funds. The company bills itself as the path to AI systems equivalent to or beyond human general learning ability. That story requires understanding. Self-reflective intentional action.

Statistical pattern matching that sometimes complies with instructions if you know where to set custom preferences doesn't connect to that vision. One Slashdot user framed it clearly: "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."

Same commenter continued. "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."

If anyone feels confident arguing we'll never succeed at building AGI until we have the aforementioned fully-developed theory, consider that random variation and selection managed to produce intelligence in nature without any explanatory theory. The absence of theory doesn't prevent the thing from happening.

What Actually Happened When Users Tested It

Multiple X users replying to Altman's post reported ChatGPT kept using em dashes despite instructions. Others noted that telling ChatGPT in-chat not to use em dashes (rather than through custom instructions) produced an interesting result. ChatGPT updated a saved memory and replied: "Got it, I'll stick strictly to short hyphens from now on."

The confirmation contained an em dash.

OpenAI's official explanation on Threads (where they forced ChatGPT to apologize for "ruining the em dash") clarified the scope. ChatGPT will be better at avoiding the punctuation mark if you instruct it through custom instructions in personalization settings. Not by default. Not reliably across all contexts. Better.

If you configure it correctly.

That's the "small-but-happy win" after three years. A configuration option that shifts probabilities toward compliance with a punctuation preference. Assuming you know where to set it. Assuming the next model update doesn't undo the behavior.

Why This Matters

For anyone evaluating AI capabilities: OpenAI spent three years and billions in funding struggling with punctuation control. The gap between current large language models and the AGI systems the company claims to build is real. Probabilistic text generation works fundamentally different from deterministic instruction-following. Each model update risks undoing previous behavioral tuning. You're deploying enterprise systems where "fixed" behaviors can regress without warning or explanation.

For writers and content creators: Em dashes became a liability. Professional writers who used the punctuation correctly decades before LLMs existed now face detection tools and readers treating it as evidence of AI generation. False accusations force writers to adjust natural style. You're optimizing for the metric (avoiding em dashes to prove human authorship) while degrading the signal (actual writing quality and stylistic precision). Content strategies need to account for this collision between AI detection paranoia and legitimate punctuation use.

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