Jess Weatherbed reports via The Verge: Midjourney has announced that it has banned Stability AI staff from using its services, accusing employees of a rival generative AI company of causing an outage while trying to collect Midjourney data earlier this month. Midjourney posted an update to its Discord server on March 2nd, acknowledging that due to an extended server outage, generated images were no longer displayed in user galleries. Midjourney said during a March 6 business update call summary that “botnet-like activity from paid accounts” (which the company specifically associates with his Stability AI employees) led to an outage. claimed to be behind.
According to Midjourney users Nick St. Pierre of XMidjourney, who was listening in on the call, said the service went down because “someone at Stability AI was trying to get all the prompt and image pairs at midnight Saturday.” St-Pierre said Midjourney linked multiple paid accounts to individuals on the Stability AI data team. In a summary of a business update conference call on March 6 (what Midjourney refers to as “office hours”), the company announced that Stability AI's use of the service would be cut short for all employees in response to the outage. He said it would be banned “indefinitely.” Midjourney is also introducing a new policy that similarly prohibits company employees who perform “aggressive automation” or cause service outages.
Saint Pierre flagged the accusation Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque responded with an Referring to the Stable Diffusion 3 AI model currently in preview, he said, “Given that SD3 outperforms all other models, this team also scrapes because it uses synthetic and other data.'' I'm very confused about how the two accounts work,” Mostaque said. He argued that if the outage was caused by a Stability employee, it was unintentional and “clearly not a DDoS attack.” Midjourney founder David Holz also responded to Mostaque in the same thread, claiming he had sent him “certain information” that would help with the internal investigation.
