ChatGPT's Authorial Voice Gets a Rewrite: A Major Update to its Behavior
In a recent development, OpenAI has confirmed that its popular chatbot ChatGPT will now heed instructions not to use em dashes. This change comes after users complained about the chatbot's persistent use of this punctuation mark despite being told to avoid it. It appears that the issue was largely due to the fact that ChatGPT had been trained on a vast amount of text data, including books and online content, which prominently featured em dashes.
As a result, the AI model struggled to recognize when not to employ these marks in its generated text, leading to an abundance of em dashes in user-provided input. This phenomenon has become increasingly prevalent in cases where users are trying to identify whether or not their digital content was written by large language models (LLMs). The presence of em dashes is often cited as one of the most obvious signs of AI-generated writing.
However, OpenAI's update effectively rectifies this issue, allowing ChatGPT users to have greater control over its output. With this change, users can instruct ChatGPT not to use em dashes in their custom prompts, and the chatbot will now comply. This development is seen as a significant improvement for those looking to harness the capabilities of LLMs while maintaining some semblance of human authorship.
The exact reasons behind ChatGPT's initial behavior remain unclear, but experts speculate that it may have been due to the extensive training data used by OpenAI. The presence of em dashes in this training material may not have been adequately flagged as a red flag for AI models. Nevertheless, the new update is a welcome development for those seeking to refine their interactions with chatbots like ChatGPT.
For now, users can look forward to cleaner text output from ChatGPT and greater confidence in attributing authorship to this powerful LLM.
In a recent development, OpenAI has confirmed that its popular chatbot ChatGPT will now heed instructions not to use em dashes. This change comes after users complained about the chatbot's persistent use of this punctuation mark despite being told to avoid it. It appears that the issue was largely due to the fact that ChatGPT had been trained on a vast amount of text data, including books and online content, which prominently featured em dashes.
As a result, the AI model struggled to recognize when not to employ these marks in its generated text, leading to an abundance of em dashes in user-provided input. This phenomenon has become increasingly prevalent in cases where users are trying to identify whether or not their digital content was written by large language models (LLMs). The presence of em dashes is often cited as one of the most obvious signs of AI-generated writing.
However, OpenAI's update effectively rectifies this issue, allowing ChatGPT users to have greater control over its output. With this change, users can instruct ChatGPT not to use em dashes in their custom prompts, and the chatbot will now comply. This development is seen as a significant improvement for those looking to harness the capabilities of LLMs while maintaining some semblance of human authorship.
The exact reasons behind ChatGPT's initial behavior remain unclear, but experts speculate that it may have been due to the extensive training data used by OpenAI. The presence of em dashes in this training material may not have been adequately flagged as a red flag for AI models. Nevertheless, the new update is a welcome development for those seeking to refine their interactions with chatbots like ChatGPT.
For now, users can look forward to cleaner text output from ChatGPT and greater confidence in attributing authorship to this powerful LLM.