AI-rony: Midjourney Bans Stability AI Employees From Using Its Service In Fear They Are Scraping Its Data

Generative AI software developer Midjourney has banned Stability AI employees from using its program after recognizing bot-like activity it suspected was a Stability employee trying to scrape data from the company.

Apparently, generative AI companies have no qualms about stealing copyrighted artwork for training purposes, but when someone else wants to scrape their data, it’s a very big deal.

Earlier this month, Midjourney linked paid user accounts to a Stability employee using a bot to scrape text prompts and the resulting images produced by the Midjourney model. Stability could theoretically use that data to train or improve its own model.

The bot set off alarms and Midjourney, leading to the company’s commercial service being suspended for 24 hours on March 2 and the Stability employee ban.

When news of the Midjourney fracas went public, Stability CEO Emad Mostaque tweeted that he was investigating what happened and denied that the Stability employee accused of scraping Midjourney’s data was acting under company orders. His tweet reads:

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.

Midjourney CEO David Holz replied:

sent you some information to help with your internal investigation

What happened after that was handled behind closed doors, but Mostaque did tell tech trade Ars Technica that his company’s relationship with Midjourney was copacetic:

No real overlap, we get on fine though. I funded Midjourney to get [them] off the ground with a cash grant to cover [Nvidia] A100s for the beta.