Remove Em Dashes and Other AI Formatting Tells
Fold em dashes, en dashes and curly quotes down to plain ASCII, and leave everything else alone. The punctuation toggle below is on for this page.
Clean the punctuation too
0 chars
Your text is processed in memory and never stored. See the full list of characters this removes.
Why em dashes became an AI tell
Somewhere around 2024 the em dash turned into shorthand for "a machine wrote this". Language models use them heavily, more heavily than most people do, and readers started noticing. OpenAI said in November 2025 that it had addressed the behaviour in ChatGPT.
It was never a watermark. It is a style habit, and like any style habit it is a weak signal, because plenty of good writers use em dashes constantly. But if you would rather your drafts did not read that way, replacing them is a two-second fix.
What the punctuation rule changes
This rule is off everywhere else on the site, because these are legitimate characters that a careful writer uses on purpose. Here it is on by default, since that is what you came for.
| Character | Codepoint | Becomes |
|---|---|---|
| Em dash — | U+2014 | Hyphen - |
| En dash – | U+2013 | Hyphen - |
| Minus sign − | U+2212 | Hyphen - |
| Curly quotes “ ” | U+201C, U+201D | Straight quotes " |
| Curly apostrophes ‘ ’ | U+2018, U+2019 | Straight apostrophe ' |
| Ellipsis … | U+2026 | Three dots ... |
What this is good for
House style. If your publication uses ASCII punctuation, or a system downstream mangles smart quotes, this converts them in one pass.
It is also the fastest way to make a draft stop looking machine-set. Typographic punctuation is the most visible surface tell in AI output, and this replaces all of it in a single click.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
- Is using em dashes proof that text is AI-written?
- No. It is a weak stylistic correlation, not evidence. Many human writers use them heavily, and AI models can be told not to. Treat any claim that dashes prove authorship with scepticism.
- Can I keep em dashes but remove the invisible characters?
- Yes. That is the default everywhere else on the site. Untick the punctuation box, or use the homepage cleaner, and dashes and curly quotes are left exactly as they are.
Last reviewed .