BY STUDENT TOM  BURKE

The field of Artificial Intelligence is a murky terrain where many make great claims, whilst few have something serious to offer.

‘Natural Language Processing’ refers to the ability of a computer to process ‘natural’ language: the language of humans.

The first generation of language apps treated words like numbers. Over the last few years they have begun to employ machine learning. They learn how humans use language.

In making this step they take a great leap forward, and they land themselves in problematic, deeply political terrain.

NATURAL responds to this clash of technology and culture and offers itself as a tool for critical reflection.

All good AI apps do something very simple, and make it sound like magic; NATURAL is an app that takes language on a worldwide journey.

NATURAL translates your source language through:

Nepalese

Arabic

Tamil

Urdu

Romanian

Albanian

Laos

and back to source.

Write a poem. Send it around the world and see what comes back.

Take a classic. Process it through millennia of bias and shifting power structures. Read it.

NATURAL is an open source publishing technology that facilitates a desire to process rather than create.

We live in a universe of objects. Why thoughtlessly produce more?

Use NATURAL to unmake sense of what you already know.

makeitnatural.net