Midjourney says it has blocked Stability AI employees from using its service, accusing employees at the rival AI company of causing a systems outage earlier this month during an attempt to extract Midjourney data.
Midjourney posted an update to its Discord server on March 2 that acknowledged that an extended server outage was preventing created images from appearing in users' galleries. In a summary of the March 6 business update call, Midjourney claimed that “botnet-like activity from paid accounts” — which the company specifically links to Stability AI employees — was behind the outage.
According to user Midjourney Nick St. Pierre on X, who listened to the call, said that the service crashed because “someone at Stability AI was trying to get all the router and image pairs at midnight on a Saturday.” St. Pierre said Midjourney linked several paid accounts to an individual on the Stability AI data team.
in it Business update call summary On March 6th (which Midjourney refers to as “business hours”), the company says it is blocking everyone It stabilized AI employees from using its services “indefinitely” in response to the outage. Midjourney is also introducing a new policy that would similarly ban employees of any company that practices “aggressive automation” or causes outages.
St. Pierre He referred to the accusations To Stability AI CEO Imad Mushtaq, who responded to X saying he was investigating the situation and that Stability had not ordered the actions in question. “It's very confusing how to do two calculations, and this team wasn't scraping data because we were using synthetic data and other data because the SD3 outperforms all the other models,” Mustak said, referring to the Stable Diffusion 3 AI model. Currently in preview. He claimed that if it was interrupted He was Due to a stability employee, it was unintentional and “clearly not a DDoS attack.”
Midjourney founder David Holz responded to Mostaque in the same thread, claiming he sent him “some information” to help with his internal investigation.
Otherwise, the situation is still evolving, and no additional updates have been provided since that conversation on March 6th. At the time of writing, neither Midjourney nor Stability AI have responded edgeRequest for comment.
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