I said it before: we need Copilot flash fill. Infer what the user wants the output to be from patterns and labels, so they can enter a few examples and then “extend” and automatically do the equivalent of a complex formula. e.g.
Formal | Informal
Lane, Thomas | Tommy Lane
Brooks, Sarah | Sarah Brooks
Yun, Christopher |
Doe, Kaitlyn |
Styles, Chris |
…
Automating something like this is extremely hard with an algorithm and extremely easy with ML. Even better, many people who use spreadsheets aren’t very familiar with coding and software, so they do things manually even in cases where the formula is simple.
I posed this exact question to character.ai's "Ask Me Anything" bot. It decided to redo the examples, too. The results:
> Lane, Thomas => Thomas Layne
> Brooks, Sarah => Sarah Brooksy
> Yun, Christopher => Chris Yun
> Doe, Kaitlyn => KD
> Styles, Chris => Chris Spice, Chris Chasm
I'm sure the bot overcomplicated an otherwise simple task, but I think there's always gonna be some creative error if we rely on things like that. It's funny though because these results are plausible for what a real person might come up with as informal nicknames for their friends.
I ... sort of got there. But then it rapidly escalated to extremely long and incoherent chains of hyphenated names with "money" and "$" and things all throughout.
