Wikipedia Puts an End Date on the Em-Dash Tell

Wikipedia's volunteer editors keep a field guide to spotting undisclosed AI text, and this month it put an end date on the most famous tell. The em-dash section now covers 2022 to September 2026, and the guide says the newest models are more and more often hard coded to avoid the dash entirely. It adds that many people still use older models that produce it, so a stray dash is a weaker clue than it was a year ago.

The measurements point the same way. Graphite's study found that Claude Opus 5 brought em dashes back to about the human rate, and that GPT and Gemini may have overcorrected. VentureBeat reports Opus 5.5 at 0.015 per 1,000 words, against 2.92 for Opus 5. Graphite is a marketing firm, so treat the figures as a guide. Our trend board row now carries them.

The shift has a human cost. Poynter reported on September 28 that editors are scrubbing dashes and second-guessing habits built over whole careers. If you like the dash, you can probably stop apologizing for it. A better test is what a sentence does. Inc. reports that Opus 5.5 favors the transition looking ahead at 40 times the human rate.

The models keep turning over. Tech Insider says Gemini 4 Argon reached the Gemini app on October 13, and a release changelog lists GPT-6 Sol as ChatGPT's default from October 7. We found no per-model tell counts for them, so we left those rows blank. Meanwhile, read your draft aloud with the draft checker or the fix-your-ai guide open, and cut any sentence that announces itself.