Midjourney Bans All Stability AI Employees Over Alleged Data Scraping

Jess Weatherbed reports via The Verge: Midjourney says it has banned Stability AI staffers from using its service, accusing employees at the rival generative AI company of causing a systems outage earlier this month during an attempt to scrape Midjourney's data. Midjourney posted an update to its Discord server on March 2nd that acknowledged an extended server outage was preventing generated images from appearing in user galleries. In a summary of a business update call on March 6th, Midjourney claimed that "botnet-like activity from paid accounts" -- which the company specifically links to Stability AI employees -- was behind the outage.

According to Midjourney user Nick St. Pierre on X, who listened to the call, Midjourney said that 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 said that Midjourney had linked multiple paid accounts to an individual on the Stability AI data team. In its summary of the business update call on March 6th (which Midjourney refers to as "office hours"), the company says it's banning all Stability AI employees from using its service "indefinitely" in response to the outage. Midjourney is also introducing a new policy that will similarly ban employees of any company that exercises "aggressive automation" or causes outages to the service.

St. Pierre flagged the accusations to Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, who replied on X, saying he was investigating the situation and that Stability hadn't ordered the actions in question. "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," said Mostaque, referring to the Stable Diffusion 3 AI model currently in preview. He claimed that if the outage was caused by a Stability employee, then it was unintentional and "obviously not a DDoS attack." Midjourney founder David Holz responded to Mostaque in the same thread, claiming to have sent him "some information" to help with his internal investigation.

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Company whose business depends on data scraping is mad at other company whose business depends on data scraping.

Re:LOL

[sg_oneill]

Reminds me of that scene from "Pirates of Silicon valley" (Great film btw) where Steve Jobs goes off the rails at Bill Gates for 'stealing' mac os with windows. Bill gates retorts that both of them are like thieves with a wealthy neighbor called xerox , and both break in to steal the TV set, and Jobs was just angry that Gates had stolen the TV set that Jobs himself had just stolen from Xerox. "I got there first!"

Re:

[TwistedGreen]

I still think the X in OS X stands for Xerox.

Re:

[alex211211]

Bill Gates counters by likening both of them to thieves in a scenario involving a wealthy neighbor named Xerox. According to Gates, they both break in to steal a TV set, and Jobs https://parcelstrackings.com/s... [parcelstrackings.com] is merely upset because Gates took the TV set that Jobs had already pilfered from Xerox. "I arrived there first," Gates asserts.

Re:

[entranced]

Deja vu. Pretty sure I'm reading a duplicate top comment on a duplicate article.

Midjourney finally found a reason

[thesjaakspoiler]

to boot the competition off their platform while I'm pretty sure they have the latest open source StableDiffusion release installed on their internal dev environment.

Bans are a joke

[Ambigwitty]

What would be the use case for this scraping activity? A paid account is accessing the server, so what? The service doesn't limit or throttle? Sounds like drama more than any real technical issue. If I had a use case for scraping their data, I now know to setup a series of accounts, throttle them, and to have the extraction process behave as if it were a human user. Backroom discussion would be pretty short, "Fuck 'em. Bounded knapsacks be damned, we're batching this bitch."

Re:

[Njovich]

I would consult your legal department before ignoring such a ban. If it comes out at any time, you think your company would have your back or they would just let you take the fall in a multi million dollar lawsuit?

Re: Bans are a joke

[Ambigwitty]

Well, I don't normally do ETL work. I wasn't serious about wanton abandon of the law. The last time I needed ETL in such a way was during the subprime mortgage meltdown when the trustee sale itself and the trustees that use them were making public information difficult to obtain.

These are the same people that used to hold secret auctions in the middle of the desert, before people realized how stupid it was to allow it. And in such a case, I might ask legal what they think, but if the only way to get data th