Gen Z discovers hack to reveal who’s using ChatGPT — and this common punctuation mark is the tell-tale 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 parenthesis. 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 lengthier hyphen is actually a so-called “ChatGPT hyphen.”

The phenomenon started gaining attention online after podcasters Daisy Reed and Sapna Rao, co-hosts of the 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 it read, “including the ChatGPT hyphen is insane.”

The hosts jokingly shared a “public service announcement” to “take out the hyphen” if you don’t want to be accused of using ChatGPT.

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-ChatGPT as long as you write your own words first, but if you’re using the platform for editing purposes, you should go through it again and put it back into your own words. “Person, ChatGPT, person,” Rao explained.

According to Reed and Rao, em dashes typically include a space on either side, and leaving out that space means that ChatGPT 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 such as most books and journals, as well as Mirriam Webster, omit the spacing, closely holding whatever comes before and after the em dash in running text.