New York, United States – In a recent development, Midjourney has taken action against Stability AI, accusing its employees of causing a major systems outage by attempting to scrape data from Midjourney’s platform. This move has led Midjourney to ban all Stability AI staff from using its services indefinitely.
The conflict escalated when Midjourney alerted users on its Discord server about the extended server outage that was affecting the display of images in user galleries. A subsequent summary of a business update call on March 6th attributed the outage to “botnet-like activity from paid accounts,” directly implicating Stability AI employees.
One user, Nick St. Pierre, who listened to the call, revealed that Midjourney identified a specific individual on the Stability AI data team responsible for trying to extract prompt and image pairs in the middle of the night. As a response, Midjourney made a decision to ban all employees from Stability AI to prevent any further disruptions.
In a further development, St. Pierre notified Stability AI CEO, Emad Mostaque, of the accusations. Mostaque responded by denying any involvement in the alleged actions and emphasized that their team had not engaged in scraping activities, as they had been utilizing synthetic and other data. He maintained that any outage caused by a Stability employee would have been unintentional and not a deliberate attack.
Founder of Midjourney, David Holz, joined the conversation by providing additional information to assist Stability AI in their internal investigation. The situation is still evolving, with no updates provided since the exchange on March 6th. Both companies have been silent in response to queries from various sources, including the Verge.
As the dispute continues to unfold, stakeholders are eagerly awaiting further developments from both Midjourney and Stability AI to shed light on the incident and its implications for the AI industry. The ban imposed by Midjourney on Stability AI employees underscores the importance of ethical conduct and respect for data integrity in the technology sector.