A few weeks ago, Midjourney's image processing service experienced an issue where it was inaccessible for almost 24 hours. After tracking down what caused this to happen, the service released a statement saying what might be happening.
Through a statement on their Discord channel, the issue occurred due to aggressive actions by the Stability AI employees responsible for the development of the Stable Diffusion image processing service aggressively scraping images and promos from the Midjourney service.
Because of this, Midjourney, through their CEO David Holz said that they have detected and banned Stability AI employees from using Midjourney services. In the same post, he said that they will introduce a new policy where users who do the same thing will also be subject to the same ban.
According to Nick St Pierre, who reported on this statement, he was in on the Midjourney discussion, and said that this Stability AI employee was using several paid accounts to obtain a combination of processed images and used proms.
The scraping that is done is very aggressive, perhaps through automation, and then causes those interrupted service issues. No details were given as to how Midjourney knew that the owners of these paid accounts were working with Midjourney, but they may have been able to track them down through the Discord accounts used.
In the meantime, the CEO of Stability AI, Emad Mostaque said that he did not understand why an employee of his company would do this because Stable Diffusion was trained using synthetic data and not by stealing data from other companies.
David Holz, CEO of Midjourney later said that he had sent the data to Emad Mostaque to see for himself what actually happened when the service was interrupted.
We expect that the CEO of Stability AI will take these allegations seriously, and perhaps the employee who reportedly scraped the Midjourney data will be disciplined, or fired.