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Midjourney has imposed a ban on all Stability AI staff following a significant downtime, accusing them of attempting to collect data from its platform illicitly.
Midjourney attributed a service outage lasting nearly one day to unauthorized data extraction activities reportedly orchestrated by individuals associated with Stability AI.
An extensive server disruption impacted image generation features. This situation led to a block on Stability AI employees, as detailed in a Discord announcement by Midjourney.
On March 6, another update linked the outage to the “bot-like activities” that allegedly had to deal with Stability AI’s team. Midjourney asserted this after identifying several accounts associated with these activities. The investigation led to a blanket prohibition of Stability AI personnel to safeguard against future incidents.
Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, responded to the allegations on X, stating an internal review was underway. He suggested any potential data scraping by a Stability AI team member was accidental, refuting the idea of a deliberate attack on Midjourney’s servers.
If anyone did do this on team (have asked, will dig, also happy if MJ reaches out direct) its not great but obviously not a DDoS attack but unintentional.
Certainly not instructed by us/Stability AI tho, really happy with our dataset & the augmentations we have on that.
— Emad (@EMostaque) March 6, 2024
Midjourney’s founder, David Holz, shared information with Mostaque on X to assist with the internal inquiry.
This incident highlights the tensions within the AI industry, especially against criticisms over the ethical use of data for training AI models. Several companies have faced legal challenges and public scrutiny over their data practices.
Most recently, three authors sued Nvidia for allegedly using their copyrighted books without permission to train its NeMo AI platform.
