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.
Infiltrating databases is too fancy a description for what was actually happening. Someone was just scraping the gallery website a little too fast, and that caused a mild DoS attack.
As happens to everyone scraping data. Sometimes you forget the delay and then you wonder why the interface is burning.