Midjourney Accuses Stable Diffusion Creator Of, Erm, Copying Its Art
Image generated on AI
Artificial intelligence art models like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are often on the receiving end of allegations of copyright infringement, but rarely do they point the finger at one another like that Spider-Man meme. Tensions are now high between the industry’s greatest players, with Midjourney purportedly suspecting Stability AI of pilfering valuable data.
As cited by AI enthusiast Nick St Pierre, Stability AI employees supposedly infiltrated Midjourney’s database and stole pairings of image and text prompts—crucial training data for AI image generators—last Saturday. Stability AI has been blamed for causing a 24-hour outage for Midjourney as a result of this action.
In MJ office hours they just said someone at Stability AI was trying to grab all the prompt and image pairs in the middle of a night on Saturday and brought down their service.
— Nick St. Pierre (@nickfloats) March 6, 2024
MJ is banning all of the stabilityAI employees from Midjourney immediately
This is breaking now
heres a more complete breakdown on the service outage and response from office hour notes pic.twitter.com/ES83vYmfoC
— Nick St. Pierre (@nickfloats) March 6, 2024
Midjourney responded swiftly by banning all Stability AI accounts from its service, according to internal reports.
The situation is dripping in irony, considering both companies train their AI on vast image datasets, which already raises questions about copyright and data ownership in the realm of AI art. It’s an accusation of digital piracy within the very industry that utilizes borrowed imagery.
They used multiple paid accounts, apparently grabbing the image URLs for all public images, along with the prompts
— Nick St. Pierre (@nickfloats) March 6, 2024
David Holz, Midjourney’s CEO, doubled down on the suspicions and indicated an ongoing investigation. Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, on the other hand, denied any wrongdoing and offered to help investigate. Interestingly, Mostaque claims to be a Midjourney supporter and even invested in the project previously.
sent you some information to help with your internal investigation
— David (@DavidSHolz) March 6, 2024
Further details remain unclear. Holz reportedly offered to share information with Mostaque to assist with his investigation. Whether this signifies a potential truce is yet to be determined.
Nevertheless, the conflict within the AI art world shows no signs of immediate resolution.
[via 80 Level and Nick St Pierre, cover image generated on AI]
