It's not often that someone wants to see your poop, particularly connected to MIT, but here we are. Microbial health company Seed asks netizens to #giveashit and contibute to what's essentially the world's first poop database (at least officially). By uploading pictures of your feces, you can help scientists train an out-of-MIT health AI called auggi and, hopefully, 1 in 5 people in the US who suffer from chronic gut conditions like IBS. "We don't always think about stool as like a daily data -- I'm putting air quotes around "dump" -- but really, as a direct output of our gut health," said Ara Katz, the co-founder and co-CEO of Seed Health, in a The Verge report. To #GIVEaSHIT, like the company asks, it won't be enough to submit any old photo of your stool. You'll have to visit seed.com/poop,

San Francisco (CNN)The next time you go to the bathroom, a couple startups are hoping you'll snap a photo before you flush. Two companies -- Auggi, a gut-health startup that's building an app for people to track gastrointestinal issues, and Seed Health, which works on applying microbes to human health and sells probiotics -- are soliciting poop photos from anyone who wants to send them. The companies began collecting the photos online on Monday via a campaign cheekily called "Give a S--t" (you can imagine what the dashes stand for) with the goal of creating the first known data set of human poop images. These pictures -- the companies hope to collect 100,000 photos in total -- can then be used to build AI for research into gut-related diseases and to help people with such health conditions more easily track their own bowel movements. "We like to say it's basically a data dump that gets flushed away each day that could really inform science," Seed cofounder and co-CEO Ara Katz told CNN Business.