Over the years, the format used in writing apps started to change from proprietary .docx to .pages and .pdf to the innocuous syntax called Markdown. Outside the tech field, few are familiar with its name, and yet more and more people use it unknowingly.9
Today, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Google Chat, Teams, and Trello, among others, use Markdown syntax, at least partially. Seeing weird characters when you copy-paste from AI? That’s because ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and others use Markdown to format their responses. GitHub, Reddit, and similar tech-oriented sites have been using their own Markdown flavors for years now.