Why are more posters now using bullet points instead of paragraphs?

[ExOptimist]

Why have so many posters started to put their comments in bullet points? I see it more and more and find it irritating.
What's wrong with just using paragraphs?

AI

AI, same reason they’re putting random sections in bold. It baffles me, surely by the time they’ve written the prompt with all the little details in, they could have just written the bloody post (same goes for people who email me at work!)

Yep, copied and pasted straight from ChatGPT or whatever!

Yes it is AI. Many posters use it as a proof reader for their posts.

AI, there is a fine example of it running at the moment.

its because thy are using ai. It might be they’ve got ai. I don’t mind if people use it a little to tidy up their responses but it seems a bit pointless to have ai completely formulate a answer for you.
its easy enough to prompt ai to never give responses with bullet points.

I think it’s AI. Which feels a bit of a shame on a chat forum!

I love bullet points! I find it’s easier for everyone to read when it’s structured that way. There’s nothing wrong with paragraphs but sometimes it’s harder to read and understand big paragraphs.

Thanks all. I've never used AI so had no idea.

Are people now becoming incapable of putting words together in a coherent form themselves? The posts I've seen with bullet points are often quite short and not on difficult topics.

I dislike the look and feel of it. It has a feeling of reading a report rather than being part of a conversation.

I have to say that I think less of people who can't string a few sentences together from their own mind and rely on a computer model to do it.

I used bullet points for a post yesterday for the first time but they were entirely my own work. It would never occur to me to use AI for MN. A list format was easier to read than a paragraph on that occasion.

But I agree, many people are outsourcing their entire thinking to AI and it is really starting to show.

Yes. If they can't formulate a comment themselves then I would view them as less intelligent and their opinions to be of less value.

I also find it hard to believe that you would never form any opinion of a poster based on what or how they write.

You're absolutely right, and here's the part that hits different

• Excessive formatting like someone has pulled out a slide deck in the middle of a cafe and started presenting the causes of WW1
• American spellings and ways of talking that no actual British human would operationalize
• Walls of text just incredible bloviation nobody wants to read, including the person posting it, so it frequently includes absolutely insane asides they don't notice

It's soooooooooooooooooo obvious and to me I just read it as 🤖💩🤖💩🤖💩🤖💩🤖💩🤖💩🤖💩🤖💩🤖💩🤖💩🤖💩🤖💩

• 🤖💩
• 🤖💩
• 🤖💩

Same. And work insisted on bullet points for all our briefings and reports so I am used to using them. It’s not always AI, don’t know why people are assuming that.

I use bullet points for work emails but it wouldn’t occur to me to use them on Mumsnet.

OP, if a post has subheadings that’s normally a sign of AI too.

That's one of the things I find minorly irritating about AI - good grammar and formatting can make your writing look like it's been generated.

Any post that does this I don’t even read. I’m not reading people’s slop, I don’t care if you’ve used it to “collect your thoughts” I fucking hate AI and I refuse to read anything written by it.

I also hate 😠 the posts 📬 constantly illustrated ✏️ with little emojis 😀.

They remind 💭 me of those awful childrens books 📖 where you push the button 🔘 to make a tinny sound effect🎵.

They were always lousy plots with uninteresting plots and writing! (The books, and the posts!)

What’s wrong with bullet points?

AI

Yes, I have copied and quoted paragraphs from published scientific studies and been accused of using AI. The people who think they can tell, really can’t.

In what's supposed to be a conversation amongst people they give me the impression that you're reading a report or agenda at work. To me it feels unnatural (which I've now found out that in the majority of cases it is).

Thanks for that info. I've noticed that too, but nothing like as frequently as the bullet points.