Female Arts- In a recent development, Midjourney has taken a strong stance against data scraping practices in the generative AI industry by banning all Stability AI employees from its service indefinitely. This decision comes after Midjourney detected “botnet-like” activity aimed at scraping prompt and image pairs in bulk, leading to a 24-hour outage for its commercial image generator service.
The ban was announced by Midjourney’s advocate Nick St. Pierre via the company’s official Discord channel. Prompt and image pairs are crucial for generative AI models like Midjourney and Stability AI’s SD3 to synthesize images and potentially aid in training rival AI models. The irony of Midjourney’s stance on scraping images was highlighted by Siobhan Ball of The Mary Sue, who pointed out Midjourney’s own practices of using scraped training data without permission.
Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque claimed that the bot activity was not intentional and stated that his company does not need Midjourney’s data as they outperform other models using synthetic data. Mostaque downplayed the rivalry with Midjourney and emphasized a positive history by mentioning that he funded Midjourney to cover Nvidia A100s for the beta.
Overall, the ban on Stability AI employees by Midjourney has raised questions about data scraping practices in the generative AI industry. As the industry continues to evolve, it will be important for companies to establish clear guidelines and boundaries when it comes to accessing and using data for training AI models.
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