Midjourney recently Banned Accounts of Stability AI employees “infinitely”
Midjourney has recently banned Stability AI employees from using its services “infinitely”. The company has taken this step after detecting a “botnet-like” activity and experiencing a 24-hour outage.
Midjourney is an AI-based platform that generates images by natural language processing called Prompts. Stability AI is a competitor of Midjourney which was founded in 2019 by Emad Mostaque.
“In MJ office hours they just said someone at Stability AI was trying to grab all the prompt and image pairs in the middle of the night on Saturday and brought down their service.”- Said Nick St. Pierre.
“MJ is banning all of the stability AI employees from Midjourney immediately” – he added.
On 2 March, the company first acknowledged an extended server outage issue. Later on 6 March, the company identified the cause as “botnet-like activity from paid accounts,” and claimed it was linked to the Stability AI employees.
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According to Midjourney user Nick St. Pierre on X, who attended the call to someone at Stability AI was trying to grab all the prompt and image pairs.
In response to this outage, Midjourney has announced that the company is banning all the accounts of all the employees of the Stability from using their services. The CEO of Stability has replied to this on X(Formerly Twitter) saying that he is conducting an investigation regarding these issues and any employee of Stability is not asked to perform such actions.
He said-” “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,”. He said that if the outage was caused by a Stability employee, then it was unintentional and “obviously not a DDoS attack.”
David Holz, the founder of Nidjourney has replied in his tweet saying-” Sent you some information to help with your internal investigation.”
Midjourney New policy:
After the recent outage activity midjourney is planning to introduce new policies for the future. As per the new policy, the “company will ban workers of any company found to be engaging in “aggressive automation” or causing service disruptions.”
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The company announced this new policy on 6 March during the same business updates where the company claims allegations against Stability Employees. Midjourney Bans All Stability AI Employees accounts with the implementation of this new policy.
After the business update on 6 March, there were no updates regarding this claim and both the companies have not shared any further steps.
However, Siobhan Ball( Author of The Mary Sue) has found it ironic and said “It turns out that generative AI companies don’t like it when you steal, sorry, scrape, images from them. Cue the world’s smallest violin.”
