What you need to know
- Microsoft Garage has a new experimental project called Trove.
- The app allows people to submit photos to help train AI.
- You can license the photos to specific projects and see how data from images is being used.
Microsoft Garage has a new app that helps photo takers and AI developers support each other. The tool is called Trove, and it allows people to contribute images to AI projects to help train AI models. Contributing images to the tool gives people a chance to win gift cards. The project also gives AI developers access to a wide range of data.
By contributing images to AI projects, people can help improve AI models. For doing so, people who submit images are entered into sweepstakes for prizes, including Amazon gift cards ranging from $25 to $500. For now, AI developers don't need to pay a fee to collect data through Trove, though pricing will be determined in the future as Trove expands.
Trove currently focuses on "inanimate objects and non-personal data for computer vision AI projects," according to the app's FAQ section. The makers of Trove plan to expand it over time to include things such as speech, text, and other data, but for now, it's limited to images.
The Trove website emphasizes that people get to control how their photos are used. You'll be able to see how images are used, details about who posts them, and be able to see all projects that are available. Images are licensed for specific projects, which means that in addition to you choosing which projects they're a part of, you also retain the rights to the images. That means you can submit them for other Trove projects or sell them anywhere you'd like.
The app is in preview right now, and you can sign up to participate on Trove's website. There are forms on the site to fill out if you're an AI developer or a photo taker. Trove is only available in the United States at this time.
