AI Text Cleaner
Paste output from ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and strip the markdown, asterisks, smart quotes and em dashes so it pastes cleanly into email, Word or a CMS. Runs entirely in your browser.
What this tool removes
AI assistants format their answers in Markdown: double asterisks for bold, hashes for headings, backticks for code, hyphens or asterisks for bullets, and blockquote arrows. When you paste that into Gmail, Word, LinkedIn or a WordPress editor, the symbols come along and you spend a minute deleting them by hand.
The cleaner strips those markers and, optionally, the typographic tells — em dashes, curly quotes, emoji — while keeping the words and paragraph breaks exactly as they were.
What it does not do
It does not rewrite, paraphrase or “humanise” the text. Every word stays where it was; only the formatting characters change. If you want the wording changed, that is an editing job, not a cleaning job.
Frequently asked questions
Is my text sent anywhere? No. The whole process is a handful of find-and-replace rules running in your browser.
Does it handle numbered lists? Yes — “1.” style lists are kept as plain numbered lines.
Can I keep the em dashes? Untick that option. Each rule is independent.
What does an AI text cleaner do?
An AI text cleaner takes the answer you copied from ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and removes the formatting symbols that only make sense inside a chat window. What is left is plain text you can paste anywhere without stray asterisks, hash signs or odd punctuation.
Chat apps display Markdown as formatting: **word** shows as bold, ## Title shows as a heading. But the copy button or a plain text selection often grabs the raw symbols, and most destinations such as Gmail, Outlook, Word, LinkedIn or a WordPress paragraph block do not convert them back. The em dashes, curly quotes and emoji that AI models like to use can also look out of place in a formal document or break older systems that expect plain ASCII characters.
Worked example: cleaning a meeting summary
Suppose an assistant gives you this, and you want to paste it into an email:
## Meeting summary**Decision:** we'll launch on Monday — pending QA.- Update the “pricing” page- Email the team
With the default options ticked, the cleaner returns:
Meeting summaryDecision: we'll launch on Monday, pending QA.Update the "pricing" pageEmail the team
The heading hashes and bold markers are gone, the em dash has become a comma, the curly quotes are straight, and the bullet hyphens are removed while each item stays on its own line. The words themselves are untouched.
What each option changes
| Option | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Remove markdown | **bold**, ## Heading, `code`, [link](url) | bold, Heading, code, link |
| Convert bullets | – item or • item | item (numbered lists stay as 1. 2. 3.) |
| Em dash | fast — and cheap / 2020 – 2024 | fast, and cheap / 2020 – 2024 |
| Smart quotes | “quote” ‘it’s’ … | “quote” ‘it’s’ … |
| Remove emoji | Done ✅ 🚀 | Done |
| Collapse blank lines | Three or more empty lines | One empty line |
When to keep the formatting, and where to paste
- Keep Markdown if the destination understands it. GitHub, Reddit, Notion, Obsidian, Slack and Discord all read at least some Markdown, so the symbols turn into real formatting there. Cleaning would lose it.
- Word and Google Docs. Paste the clean text, then apply headings and bold with the editor’s own styles. That gives you proper document structure instead of fake bold made of asterisks.
- WordPress. Paste the clean text into the block editor; each blank-line-separated chunk becomes its own paragraph block. Turn heading lines into Heading blocks afterwards for good on-page structure.
- Emails and LinkedIn. These do not render Markdown at all, so clean first. Consider unticking the em dash option if you like dashes and just want the asterisks gone.
- Code snippets. Removing markdown also removes the backticks around code. If you need to keep code blocks exactly, copy those parts separately.
- Always proofread. Cleaning fixes symbols, not facts. Read the text once before you send or publish it.
More questions
Why does ChatGPT put asterisks in its answers?
The model writes in Markdown, where asterisks mark bold and italic text. The chat window turns them into formatting, but when the raw text is copied into a program that does not read Markdown, the asterisks show up as plain characters.
Why do AI tools use so many em dashes?
Em dashes are common in the published writing these models learned from, so they appear often in AI output. They are correct punctuation, but many readers now see heavy dash use as a sign of AI-written text, so some people prefer to replace them.
Will cleaning the text make it undetectable as AI writing?
No. The cleaner changes formatting characters only, not the wording, sentence structure or ideas. It is meant for tidy pasting, not for disguising where text came from.
What happens to Markdown tables?
The pipe characters are removed, and each row becomes a line with the cells separated by spaces. The divider row under the header is left as a line of dashes, so delete it by hand. For a proper table, rebuild it with your editor’s table tool.
Related tools: check the length of your cleaned text with the word counter, see how many tokens a draft uses with the token counter, or get better answers in the first place with the prompt library.
Further reading: Markdown (Wikipedia).