system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What is the difference between "&" and "and", and in what context to use one over the other?
gpt
In most cases there's no difference. A good rule of thumb is to always use "and" unless there is a specific design/stylistic reason to use the ampersand.

There are industries and contexts where they can mean different things. For example, in screenwriting, "By John Doe & Jane Smith" means that the two people collaborated together on the script, while "By John Doe and Jane Smith" means that they worked on different drafts or versions of the script, and may have never even met each other.