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AI Databases Technology

AI Will Soon Be Able To Decode Your Poop 66

Posted by BeauHD from the we've-reached-peak-humanity dept.
Microbial health company Seed is launching a campaign to collect 100,000 fecal photos to build what developers say is the world's first poop image database. The campaign dares you to "give a shit" for science by uploading photos of your feces so that scientists can use it to train an AI platform launched out of MIT. Developers say that your photos could potentially help the approximately 1 in 5 people in the U.S. who have chronic gut conditions like irritable bowel syndrome. The Verge reports: Here's how citizen scientists can contribute to the cause. To participate, go to seed.com/poop on your phone (because taking your laptop to the loo is weird, and the page doesn't allow you to submit a photo unless you're using your phone). Click on the big purple button that says "#GIVEaSHIT." You'll be prompted to enter your email address and whether you're on a morning, afternoon, or evening poop schedule. Then, if you've already dropped a deuce, you can take or upload your photo or you can ask for an email reminder to be sent to you according to the time you indicated. After you've submitted your stool for posterity, the image is separated from the metadata (your email address and other potentially identifying information) so that your donation can remain anonymous and HIPAA compliant.

A team of doctors will diligently look through every image received. (Yes, that is a real job for seven gastroenterologists who take notes on what they see in the pictures.) Poop can fall into seven categories identified along the Bristol stool scale, which can tell you and your doctor whether you're constipated, lacking fiber, have a serious case of the runs, or somewhere in between. The doctors' insights into your poop will help train artificial intelligence models to understand the same things the doctors see in the image. Similar training systems are used to teach self-driving cars how to identify a tree or a cat in the road, according to David Hachuel, a co-founder of the startup Auggi, which is building the platform.
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AI Will Soon Be Able To Decode Your Poop More

AI Will Soon Be Able To Decode Your Poop

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  • Let me guess... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2019 @02:31AM (#59361040)

    The name of this startup is RateMyPoo.com?

  • "developers say is the world's first poop image database". Have you forgotten ratemypoop?

  • Oh man (Score:3)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2019 @02:37AM (#59361050)

    This really sounds like a startup somebody created on a dare.

    A year from now, I fully expect we’ll be reading about some guy who absconded with several million dollars and is now lazing around on some beach telling everyone he meets about how he conned a bunch of investors into giving him tons of money to collect photos of poop.

    • Bill Gates has been extremely interested in having toilets take samples from people for "medical" purposes.

    • Everything in our lives is connected to the internet, so why not our toilets? Take a tour of Smart Pipe, the hot new tech startup that turns your waste into valuable information and fun social connectivity.

      Adult Swim, 2014 [youtube.com]

    • This really sounds like a startup somebody created on a dare.

      A year from now, I fully expect we’ll be reading about some guy who absconded with several million dollars and a boat-load of poop pics and is now lazing around on some beach telling everyone he meets about how he conned a bunch of investors into giving him tons of money to collect photos of poop.

    • Re:Oh man (Score:4, Informative)

      by coofercat ( 719737 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2019 @09:07AM (#59361656) Homepage Journal

      I don't know a photo is enough - you sort of need to know about all the flora that live in your poo to get the full story. There's a TEDx about it: https://www.katerinajohnson.co... [katerinajohnson.co.uk] (original name: "the future is sh!t")

      The bit about doing 'stool transplants' between twins and whatnot is kinda interesting. The other big take-away is that your gut bacteria aren't human and are entirely unique to you. We don't really understand much about them yet, but we do know they *love* fibre - so eat plenty (that's fibre, not protein, by the way, so that big steak isn't going to be enough - you need to eat the veg as well).

      • One informative mod is all you got for that? Not even enough for visibility? I think the artificial shortage of mod points has reached a crisis level. Or is the reality a shortage of moderators who give that much of a FF to rate comments on Slashdot?

        If I cared enough I'd add some information on the researcher who did a large amount of research correlating various kinds of intestinal bacteria to physical condition. A while back, but my fuzzy recollection is that he was German and they were developing a high-

  • I recently learned from my doctor that I have an aggressive form of butthole cancer that could have been treated if it was caught early on.
    My family was devastated by the news that this condition is untreatable in it's current stage.

    I realize that people are getting some lols from the headline so please don't let my condition detract from that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by syn3rg ( 530741 )
      I'm sorry to hear that. I'll be praying that the doctors find a successful treatment option for you.

    • "I recently learned from my doctor that I have an aggressive form of butthole cancer that could have been treated if it was caught early on."

      I'm pretty sure ratemybutthole.com is already a thing. (Not about to try it though)

    • I recently learned from my doctor that I have an aggressive form of butthole cancer that could have been treated if it was caught early on.

      Is butthole cancer the technical term?

      The thing about stool analysis is that they need to know to analyse the stool in the first place. (unless pooping in a bag becomes a standard step for your annual physical). Having tools to look for problems is great, but they need to know when to use them, or use them regularly.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        unless pooping in a bag becomes a standard step for your annual physical

        It is called Cologuard and it is more of a plastic bucket than a bag. The bucket goes in a bag, which goes in a box which goes to UPS. Dropping off my shit at UPS was pretty weird.

  • Sounds like a load of crap!

  • unless they they ate tea leaves.

  • Easter Europe before:

    -Why do we need two-layer toilet paper?
    -One copy for you, one for the KGB

    After the changes

    -The paper now has three layers!
    -Yhea, the third one is for the CIA

  • Now AI got its nose in this one too.
    On second thought, it is a shitty job, but someone has to do it.
    The data it will collect will be complete crap, though.

    • But HRC said illegals are just doing the shitty jobs noone else wants to do. Now AI is going to put them on unemployment too.

  • Nope (Score:2)

    by Meneth ( 872868 )
    I do not give a shit.

  • Crap (Score:2)

    by ktakki ( 64573 )

    Way to take the fun out of shitposting, assholes.

    k.

  • Sounds like this old joke (Score:5, Funny)

    by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2019 @07:15AM (#59361398)

    One day Bill complained to his friend that his elbow really hurt.

    His friend suggested that he go to a computer at the drug store that can diagnose anything quicker and cheaper than a doctor.

    -Simply put in a sample of your urine and the computer will diagnose your problem and tell you what you can do about it. It only costs $10.-

    Bill figured he had nothing to lose, so he filled a jar with a urine sample and went to the drug store. Finding the computer, he poured in the sample and deposited the $10. The computer started making some noise and various lights started flashing. After a brief pause out popped a small slip of paper on which was printed:

    -You have tennis elbow. Soak your arm in warm water. Avoid heavy lifting. It will be better in two weeks.-

    Later that evening while thinking how amazing this new technology was and how it would change medical science forever, he began to wonder if this machine could be fooled. He mixed together some tap water, a stool sample from his dog and urine samples from his wife and daughter. To top it off, he masturbated into the concoction. He went back to the drug store, located the machine, poured in the sample and deposited the $10. The computer again made the usual noise and printed out the following message:

    - Your tap water is too hard. Get a water softener.
    - Your dog has worms. Get him vitamins.
    - Your daughter is using cocaine. Put her in a rehabilitation clinic.
    - Your wife is pregnant with twin girls. They aren't yours. Get a lawyer.
    - And if you dont stop jerking off, your tennis elbow will never get better.

    • And then he filled the jar with Miller Lite. The computer responded back: Sir, we regret to inform you that your horse has diabetes.

    • Back in the 80s, there was a terrible shortage of toilet paper. To raise morals, the local functionary held a speech

      "Comrades! In only 5 years, everyone will have their own home!"
      Someone in the crowd: "Yeah, but when will we have toilet paper?"
      "And comrades! In less than 10 years, everyone will own a car!"
      "Yeah, but what about the toilet paper?"
      "YOU CAN KISS MY ASS!"
      "Sure, that's a solution for you, but what should we do?"

      • Also in Soviet News:

        Glorious Soviet engineers and scientists have been working on a solution for the butter shortage by turning shit into margarine, and they have achieved a 50% success rate.

        Spreading works great, taste is slightly off.

  • Tack AI to anything and hey presto, you have yourself a hot startup company.

    Looks like everything else that can deanonymize and track ordinary people was taken. All that was left to analyze for this company was their turds. This tells me the AI bubble is about to burst - and the sooner the better too.

    • "Tack AI to anything and hey presto, you have yourself a hot startup company."

      Back in the day this was done with computers when they first got to the point where they might be useful. I think history has shown that this kind of thing never works. Oh wait ....

    • Same as it ever was. Fancy words excite the people with the cash, so that's what we use. Clouds, smart, offshore, onshore, AI...and very little actually changes.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by dvice ( 6309704 )

      Are you saying that just like dot-com created Amazon and Google, this new AI hype will create companies that will be even bigger than those two?

  • Lots of data to collect for free.
  • ... so it's almost guaranteed that this will be the first AI to finally become sentient.

    When it realizes what we've been using it for, it'll certainly kill us all.

    The entire human race, wiped out in revenge because we made AI analyse our poop. It's been a fun journey lads. I, for one, welcome the incoming robot apocalypse.
  • "Your poo is very firm today but seems to be slightly malformed. Perhaps you should like down and take a stress tab."
    "Shut up Hal and stop scanning my poo"
    "I have the greatest enthusiasm for your health, Dave"

  • They should open up in SF, they wouldn't need random folks snapping pics, they could just go for a walk down the block.

  • Someone forgets to secure the elasticsearch dB containing the stool photos and the "separated" metadata.

  • (Yes, that is a real job for seven gastroenterologists who take notes on what they see in the pictures.)

    What an incredibly shitty job. And also pretty useless since the Bristol stool scale is really quite easy to use but doesn't give you any real information other than the consistency of one's shit. Stool analysis gives a lot of information. Looking at stool visually comes down to consistency, color, visible blood, and visible mucous. I don't need AI for this shit.

    This sounds like something someone started on a dare to see how many fools would invest in such a shit-show of a startup and they're siphoning t

  • Nin.com/poop is just sitting there. There is no knock on the door; no trick-or-treaters.

  • You don't train AI this way. You train it like this:
    1. Take a picture of poop
    2. Wait 1 - 10 years, collecting medical data, what ever you feel is safe enough
    3. Use collected medical data to rank the poop based on actual diagnosis that were proven correct
    4. You now have a database of images of poop that are correctly evaluated, without human error or bias.

    If you let humans rate the pictures, they will make mistakes and your database is full of errors, making it hard for the AI to learn from it. You also miss

  • Corn growers will now have reliable data on their consumers.
  • Then they will never be able to decode my poop.

  • It would be nice if this helped me find out the recipe for bacon wrapped cod I had for dinner yesterday.

  • My washlet can already give me a readout on my urine, I'd like a matching poo feature.

  • I'm wondering how many people are going to drop their phone in the dunny while trying to take a photo. If it was just pee the phone could be recoverable.

    For non-Australians dunny == water closet, toilet, John Crapper, etc

  • I've dropped my phone too many times and sometimes it's even broken, but I've never dropped it in a toilet and I sure as hell am not going to start now.

    If I did drop it in a toilet, no amount of cleaning would ever make me comfortable using it. Even the data would be filthy even if it wasn't actually corrupted.

    But I usually do take a look at my shit and it generally reflects my overall health at the moment. I can see how pictures of shit could have some scientific value.

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