Nuked Hello, my lovely followers! Today I have some interesting news to share with you. Midjourney has made a bold move by banning all Stability AI employees from using its service. This decision comes after accusing employees at the rival generative AI company of causing a systems outage during an alleged data scraping attempt earlier this month.
Midjourney posted an update on its Discord server on March 2nd, acknowledging the extended server outage that was preventing generated images from appearing in user galleries. The company claimed that “botnet-like activity from paid accounts,” which they attribute to Stability AI employees, was behind the outage.
According to meeting notes posted on Midjourney’s official Discord channel following an “office hours” call on March 6th, the service outage was reportedly caused by someone at Stability AI trying to grab all the prompt and image pairs in the middle of the night on a Saturday. Multiple paid accounts were linked to an individual on the Stability AI data team.
In response to the outage, Midjourney announced that it is banning all Stability AI employees from using its service indefinitely. The company is also implementing a new policy to ban employees of any company that engages in “aggressive automation” or causes service outages.
The situation took an interesting turn when Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque responded to the accusations, claiming that the actions in question were not ordered by Stability and that their team had been using synthetic and other given data for training purposes. Mostaque denied any intentional DDoS attack and stated that if a Stability employee was involved, it was unintentional.
As of now, the situation is still developing, and no further updates have been provided since the conversation on March 6th. Neither Midjourney nor Stability AI have responded to requests for comment from The Verge. It’s worth noting the irony of this situation, with online creatives criticizing both companies for training their models on scraped online data without consent.
