it needs to be a "Long Text" field and then you can highlight your list and click the formatting pop-up and change to "checklist". 

If you'd like to do this automated, you could check out this base  where you use a formula field to format the data, and use an automation to paste that formatted data into the long text field that has rich text formatting enabled.  (You can duplicate the base to get the formula used)

Using copy paste with the formula field doesn't work unfortunately