AI chat tools write in markdown by default - the asterisks, pound signs, and dashes you see are formatting instructions meant for a markdown renderer, not something you actually want sitting in a Word document or an email you're sending to a client.

Why markdown shows up as raw symbols when you paste it

Markdown only renders correctly in an app that specifically interprets it (most chat interfaces, GitHub, some note apps). Paste that same text into Word, Gmail, or a plain text field, and you get the literal symbols left behind - **bold** instead of bold, # Heading instead of an actual heading.

Getting clean, formatting-free text out of ChatGPT or Claude

The most reliable fix is asking the AI directly to respond in plain text with no markdown - most models will comply if you say so explicitly in the prompt. When that's not practical (you already have the output and don't want to regenerate it), running the text through a markdown stripper afterward gets you to the same place.

Converting markdown to proper HTML or Word formatting instead

If you actually want the formatting to carry over - bold stays bold, headers stay headers - rather than just disappearing, converting markdown to HTML first and then pasting that into a rich-text editor usually preserves it correctly, which is a different goal from stripping formatting out entirely.

Getting ChatGPT to output an actual table

Ask explicitly for "a markdown table" if you want the structured grid format, or specify the exact column headers you want if the default structure isn't quite right - being specific about the output format in the prompt itself consistently gets better results than hoping the model guesses what you want.

A tool that handles the stripping for you

Our AI Text Cleaner strips stray markdown symbols and formatting artifacts out of pasted AI output in one pass, which covers the most common version of this problem without needing to manually hunt down every asterisk and pound sign.