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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/in-ironic-twist-midjourney-bans-rival-ai-firm-employees-for-scraping-its-image-data/ [arstechnica.com]

On Wednesday, Midjourney [arstechnica.com] banned all employees from image synthesis rival Stability AI [arstechnica.com] from its service indefinitely after it detected "botnet-like" activity suspected to be a Stability employee attempting to scrape prompt and image pairs in bulk. Midjourney advocate Nick St. Pierre tweeted [x.com] about the announcement, which came via Midjourney's official Discord channel.
[...]
Siobhan Ball of The Mary Sue found it ironic [themarysue.com] that a company like Midjourney, which built its AI image synthesis models using training data scraped off the Internet [arstechnica.com] without seeking permission, would be sensitive about having its own material scraped. "It turns out that generative AI companies don’t like it when you steal, sorry, scrape, images from them. Cue the world’s smallest violin."
[...]
Shortly after the news of the ban emerged, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque said [x.com] that he was looking into it and claimed that whatever happened was not intentional. He also said it would be great if Midjourney reached out to him directly. In a reply on X [x.com], Midjourney CEO David Holz wrote, "sent you some information to help with your internal investigation."
[...]
When asked about Stability's relationship with Midjourney these days, Mostaque played down the rivalry. "No real overlap, we get on fine though," he told Ars and emphasized a key link in their histories. "I funded Midjourney to get [them] off the ground with a cash grant to cover [Nvidia] A100s [arstechnica.com] for the beta."

Midjourney stories on SoylentNews: https://soylentnews.org/search.pl?tid=&query=Midjourney&sort=2 [soylentnews.org]
Stable Diffusion (Stability AI) stories on SoylentNews: https://soylentnews.org/search.pl?tid=&query=Stable+Diffusion&sort=2 [soylentnews.org]

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