Apparently, MJ is now in conflict with Stable Diffusion developer over image theft. Ironic.

While DALL-E developer OpenAI is busy fighting with Elon Musk, the creators of two other notable image generation AIs, Midjourney and Stability AI, seem to have sparked a beef of their own over the most ironic thing imaginable, considering the nature of the companies involved – image theft.

According to a recent tweet shared by AI enthusiast Nick St. Pierre, the alleged theft occurred last Saturday. It is claimed that employees from Stability AI infiltrated Midjourney's database and stole all prompt and image pairs, an action that also caused a 24-hour outage. In response, MJ reportedly banned all Stable Diffusion developers from its services, a move supposedly disclosed internally within the company on Wednesday.

In the comments on Nick's tweet, both David Holz and Emad Mostaque, CEOs of Midjourney and Stability AI respectively, made an appearance. The former confirmed the theft and mentioned that the team had already obtained some information on the issue, while the latter denied instructing his employees to steal from Midjourney and promised to assist with the investigation. Given the amicable relationship between the two CEOs, it's highly likely that their statements are genuine and not an attempt at damage control.

Nick also shared a more thorough overview of Midjourney's office hour notes, providing additional info on the matter:

At the moment, the situation is still unfolding, and there's limited information about the actual culprits behind the theft and whether or not Stability AI directed them to target their competitor. However, there's one thing I'm certain of – Midjourney being outraged about image theft is the absolute pinnacle of irony.

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