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Midjourney bans all Stability AI employees over alleged data scraping

Mar 11, 2024 - theverge.com
Midjourney, a generative AI company, has banned employees of rival firm Stability AI from using its service, accusing them of causing a systems outage while trying to scrape data. The company linked the outage to "botnet-like activity from paid accounts" specifically associated with Stability AI employees. Midjourney user Nick St. Pierre reported that the service was disrupted because someone at Stability AI was trying to gather all the prompt and image pairs in the middle of the night. In response, Midjourney has banned all Stability AI employees indefinitely and is implementing a policy to ban employees from any company that uses aggressive automation or causes service outages.

Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque is investigating the allegations, stating that his team hasn't been scraping data and suggesting that if an outage was caused by a Stability employee, it was unintentional. Midjourney founder David Holz has provided information to assist with Mostaque's internal investigation. Both companies, along with the broader generative AI industry, have faced criticism for training their models on large amounts of online data scraped without consent, leading to several copyright lawsuits.

Key takeaways:

  • Midjourney has banned Stability AI employees from using its service, accusing them of causing a systems outage by attempting to scrape Midjourney's data.
  • The alleged incident occurred in the middle of the night on a Saturday and was linked to multiple paid accounts associated with an individual on the Stability AI data team.
  • Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque has denied ordering the actions in question and suggested that if an outage was caused by a Stability employee, it was unintentional.
  • Midjourney is also introducing a policy to ban employees of any company that uses "aggressive automation" or causes service outages.
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