https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/11/24097495/midjourney-bans-stability-ai-employees-data-theft-outage
Midjourney claims the alleged activity caused a 24-hour service outage.
It's not that they were scraping the data, it's that they basically created a ddos attack with how they were scraping the data.
It's still on midjourney for not putting protections in place to prevent it, though.
it’s that they basically created a ddos attack with how they were scraping the data.
This is trivial to mitigate with a common-sense throttling. You throttle at a level that would not bother a human, but would still block a bot. Almost all websites like Instagram do this.
Yeah, that's why it's ultimately on Midjourney for not protecting against that.
My point was just that the title is misleading and this isn't a case of them banning a dev account just for scraping. It's pretty standard to ban accounts that exhibit bot-like behavior, so this really isn't even news.
Someone was scraped Midjourney's gallery website fast enough to cause a mild DoS attack. So they're kind of mad about that. They don't seem to have a lot of overhead. They can barely run all of their services from what I understand.
I wonder how much copyrighted work there is in Midjourney :) Would they be willing to submit their datasets for an audit?
Fun fact: Midjourney bans prompts depicting genocidal dictator Xi Jinping, but no other world leaders.