AI Slop is a term that has become popular this year. It refers to the low-quality content generated by artificial intelligence that currently reigns on the Internet. And saying ‘queen’ is not an exaggeration. Already a year ago, a study carried out by researchers from Amazon Web Services encrypted in a 57% the content generated or translated by AI that is published on the Internet. Another more recent study, prepared by the technology school MIOTI Tech&Business School next to AECOC Techventured that by the end of 2026 the 90% of the texts that are published will be generated by artificial intelligence.
Beyond the dizzying figures, any reader will have often had suspicions about whether a text, published in a medium, a blog, a book or a social network, has been written by a person, a ChatGPT either Geminior by a combination of both. There are patterns that are recognizable in the writing that ChatGPT does, for example the most popular chatbot that already has 800 million userssomething that no other app has achieved in such a short time.
The tendency to put as many commas as possible; or the use of colons replacing conjunctive phrases such as ‘given that’; or the infinite desire to put information in a succession of headings are some examples of ChatGPT’s habits with the texts it creates and also translates or corrects.
All of this can be done by a human when writing, of course, but its excessive use generates suspicion, although not certainty about the nature of the text.
Why the use of — is suspicious
A more revealing case is that of the stripe either long dash (—), which is used for dialogues, paragraphs and enumerations. Since the success of ChatGPT, launched at the end of 2022, it has gained prominence and its use, although possible by a person when writing, does raise more than just suspicion for one reason: it’s not on the keyboard. Neither in the key layout in Spanish nor in English.
Enter it, both on a computer and on a mobile, requires added effort compared to other orthographic symbols. And we already know what usually wins in the effort/comfort dilemma.
How to enter the line from a keyboard
In the last century, before everyone abandoned classic typewriters to switch to computers, using it was very simple since most of them They did have a dedicated key for the line. With a computer or mobile phone, it is not enough to look at the keyboard to locate it, but You must know the necessary method to access this symbol depending on the platform being used.
It can be written by keyboard shortcutsboth in Windows as in macOS. In the first case, you have to use the combination Alt key + 0151; In the second, it is a little more complicated: Option key + Shift + –. And in a word processor like Microsoft Word It is found as a symbol and can be entered following the path Insert > Symbol and selecting the subset in the options panel Overall score.
On the keyboard of a mobile phone, such as gboard of Googlealso requires more presses than normal to reach the line. It is found as one of the options available if hold down the dash key on the symbol keyboard.
Now, when the Internet is full of texts that make extensive use of this symbol, what is more likely? That the author of the text is so meticulous as to know and use some of those keyboard shortcuts or that it was ChatGPT who created the text or, at least, corrected it? Not to mention that if the symbol does not have a dedicated key it is for the simple reason that it is little used. Or it was little used. Now, however, many users interpret it as a text sign coming from an AI.
OpenAI provides a solution
The issue has become large enough for OpenAI to address it. Last Thursday, Sam Altman posted on
Small-but-happy win:
If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it’s supposed to do!
—Sam Altman (@sama) November 14, 2025
So here we have the CEO of the most valuable AI company in the world, constantly promising the advent of a AGI either general artificial intelligence that will surpass the human, celebrating that its most popular product is capable of following a simple rule of style and avoiding lines in the texts. If we are still there, it seems that we can wait seated for the famous AGI.