Midjourney Bans Stability AI Staff, Alleging Data Scraping Misconduct

Midjourney Accuses Stability AI of Data Scraping, Bans Employees

Systems Outage Linked to Botnet-Like Activity

Midjourney, a generative AI company, has taken strong action against rival firm Stability AI, banning its employees from using the Midjourney service indefinitely. The decision comes after Midjourney experienced an extended server outage on March 2nd, which the company claims was caused by “botnet-like activity from paid accounts” linked to Stability AI staff members attempting to scrape Midjourney’s data.

Eyewitness Account and CEO Response

According to Midjourney user Nick St. Pierre, who listened in on a business update call, the service was brought down because “someone at Stability AI was trying to grab all the prompt and image pairs in the middle of a night on Saturday.” St. Pierre noted that Midjourney had connected multiple paid accounts to an individual on the Stability AI data team.

When informed of the accusations, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque responded on X (formerly Twitter), stating that he was investigating the situation and that Stability had not ordered the actions in question. Mostaque expressed confusion over how two accounts could cause such an outage and claimed that if a Stability employee was responsible, it was unintentional and “obviously not a DDoS attack.”

Ongoing Investigation and Ironic Twist

Midjourney founder David Holz claimed to have sent Mostaque “some information” to aid in his internal investigation. As of writing, neither company has provided further updates or responded to requests for comment.

The situation has taken an ironic turn, as both Midjourney and Stability AI have faced criticism and legal action for training their AI models on masses of online data scraped from artists’ works without consent. The accusation of data scraping by Stability AI employees has not been lost on the creative community, with some pointing out the hypocrisy of the situation.

Very confusing how 2 accounts would do this team also hasn’t been scraping as we have been using synthetic & other data given SD3 outperforms all other models.

As the story continues to unfold, it remains to be seen how the actions of a few individuals may impact the relationship between these two prominent generative AI companies and their standing within the creative community.