Nick St. Pierre, the creative director of the generative neural network Midjourney, reported in his X that employees of Stability AI, another generative neural network, attacked the service in an attempt to download promo + image pairs. They used the scraping method.
Mr. Nick writes that the attack was carried out from two accounts registered with Stability AI. Due to the large number of requests, the service could not cope with the load and was down for almost a day.
Midjourney has restricted access to all accounts related to Stability AI.
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
Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI, responded to this and said that he couldn't believe that only 2 accounts could put the service on hold for a day.
Mostaque said he was a big fan of Midjourney and invested in the project at the beginning of its development. Whoever did this was not a planned attack from Stability AI, but rather an unfortunate accident.
The company has already launched an internal investigation into the matter.
If anyone did do this on team (have asked, will dig, also happy if MJ reaches out direct) its not great but obviously not a DDoS attack but unintentional.
— Emad (@EMostaque) March 6, 2024
Certainly not instructed by us/Stability AI tho, really happy with our dataset & the augmentations we have on that.