Midjourney has accused Stability AI employees of triggering a system outage through data scraping, leading to a ban on Stability AI staff from accessing its service. The incident, acknowledged by Midjourney on March 2nd, unfolded during a business update call on March 6th, where Midjourney claimed that “botnet-like activity from paid accounts,” allegedly linked to Stability AI employees, was the cause.
Multiple paid accounts were reportedly associated with an individual on the Stability AI data team. Consequently, Midjourney implemented an indefinite ban on all Stability AI employees from using its service and introduced a new policy prohibiting employees of any company engaging in “aggressive automation” or causing service outages.
In response, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque denied involvement in the alleged scraping activity, stating that the company was investigating the incident. However, if a Stability employee was responsible for the outage, Mostaque claimed it was unintentional and not a deliberate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
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Midjourney founder David Holz offered assistance to Stability AI’s internal investigation. Nevertheless, the situation continues to evolve, with no further updates provided since the March 6th conversation.
The incident has drawn criticism from online creatives, highlighting concerns about the use of generative AI systems and the training of models on scraped online data without consent. Both Stable Diffusion and Midjourney have faced copyright lawsuits and scrutiny for their practices.
