[HN Gopher] Midjourney bans all Stability AI employees over alle...
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Midjourney bans all Stability AI employees over alleged data
scraping
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 67 points
Date : 2024-03-11 19:37 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| jrflowers wrote:
| It is good to see mid journey take a meaningful stance against
| web scraping
| dvt wrote:
| Not sure if this is sarcastic, but quite literally every single
| piece of art that Midjourney, DALL-E, etc. have been trained on
| was scraped without the copyright owner's consent.
|
| If anything, it's the epitome of hypocrisy.
| onedognight wrote:
| Your parent was clearly being sarcastic. Live by the sword,
| die by the sword.
| baq wrote:
| Watching Adobe come out of this shitshow victorious:
| priceless.
| hamoodhabibi wrote:
| The year is 2024: companies that used scraping to build its
| products are now trying to legislate scraping as an illegal act
| bamboozled wrote:
| But the training data isn't important!
| 0xEF wrote:
| Now I'm curious how many tech companies actively used
| questionable practices to build their foundation, then lobbied
| to make those practices illegal to mitigate competition. I've a
| feeling this is so common that they don't even see the irony in
| it anymore.
| salawat wrote:
| All of them. Building a value moat and rolling up the ladder
| 101.
| baq wrote:
| Irony is something made out of metal in the VC money fueled
| world of make it useful then make it expensive.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| That's what FTX was attempting to do with regard to
| cryptocurrency
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| If only they could have stolen billions instead, it would
| have been so much simpler
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| I read _The PayPal Wars_ and it was wild to me how the author
| goes back and forth between complaining about how much
| regulation sucks and talking about how great it was that
| could take advantage of regulation in their fight about eBay.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| "Lyft joins Uber in fight for stronger taxi regulations"
|
| Waiting for The Onion to write it. Or the NY Times; both are
| just as likely.
| sailfast wrote:
| All of them. It's no coincidence Facebook is leading the
| charge to regulate social media, AI, and other technology
| usage.
|
| Regulation is a nice "free"* moat once you've made it.
|
| *lobbying costs aside
| dylan604 wrote:
| Don't you remember the open letter for getting current AI
| devs to halt under some false premise while the true
| reasoning was to give time for the late starters to catch
| up?
|
| These people have no morals, and if social media were to
| suddenly disappear, I think the planet and all that live on
| it would be better for it
| chatmasta wrote:
| This is nothing new. Google built an entire business on
| scraping and indexing content, and then aggressively blocks
| anyone from scraping that index.
|
| If you think about it, it's kind of weird that there is no
| official API for Google search. They've got one for all their
| other products.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Google: if your website is full of ads, we'll downrank you.
| >:(
|
| Also Google: we automatically enabled vignette interstitials
| on your website. :)
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Google: if your website is slow to load we'll downrank you
|
| Also Google: builds tool that claims you load a bunch of JS
| & CSS from their ad network, thus making your own website
| slow
| ipaddr wrote:
| If you are fast to load we will present a slower amp link
| instead
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Don't forget bloated Google Analytics and ad tracking
| garbage.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| The Google Search API was one of the first big Web 2.0
| examples of an API. Basically every big colorful "how to do
| APIs" or "learn JavaScript" book in Barnes and Nobles used
| the Google Search API as their main example of what an API
| was and how useful it was until 2011 or so, when Google
| started turning it down.
| oleganza wrote:
| Your sarcasm is valid on its own, but here the issue is more
| towards DoS rather than copying of the content.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| To be fair, they didn't say that what Stability AI did was
| _illegal_ , just that they didn't like it and were banning the
| people involved from their service.
| gfodor wrote:
| Which companies?
| WhatsName wrote:
| Is this legal, seems anticompetitive to me? It feels a lot like
| tool companies requiring you to sign a contract not to build
| tools with it.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Quite ironic for calling illegal to do what the entire business
| is founded upon.
|
| And if it's a paid account (not multiple bot-created free
| accounts), they should have some rate limiting in place. That
| smeels like bad API architecture. Like basics architecture.
| artninja1988 wrote:
| So they're complaining about scraping taking down MJ. I don't
| understand the allegations... if they're scraping things from
| Discord that wouldn't bring down MidJourney. The only way you'd
| bring down MJ would be to... use their service too much? Am I
| missing something?
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Yeah the claims made are highly suspicious and come across as
| paranoid to me. If they're saying the Midjourney discord server
| is being scraped - well yeah, even if it's against your ToS,
| it's so trivial to do as long as you're invited to that server
| that they should just assume their competitors will and not
| rely on that as a competitive advantage.
|
| And I guess that's what it ultimately feels like - they don't
| have a competitive advantage operating in the open so they'd
| rather whine about it than get to work making stuff.
| tripplyons wrote:
| Maybe they just shut down to prevent further scraping and
| didn't communicate that well.
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(page generated 2024-03-11 23:02 UTC)