In response to the ban, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque claimed that the incident was not intentional and was the result of a bot run by a team member for a personal project. He also stated that his company does not need Midjourney's data, as they have been using synthetic and other data, and their model, Stable Diffusion 3, outperforms all other models. Mostaque emphasized that his company only scrapes data that has proper robots.txt and is permissive, and they have a full opt-out for Stable Diffusion 3.
Key takeaways:
- Midjourney has banned all employees from its rival company, Stability AI, from its service indefinitely due to suspected "botnet-like" activity that caused a 24-hour outage.
- The suspected activity involved scraping prompt and image pairs in bulk, which could potentially aid the training of a rival AI image generator model.
- Stability AI CEO, Emad Mostaque, denied the allegations, stating that the bot was collecting prompts for a personal project and that no images were scraped.
- Midjourney has faced criticism for its own data scraping practices, with artist Jingna Zhang describing the company's use of her work as 'dehumanizing'.