Image-scraping Midjourney bans rival “AI” firm for scraping images

On Wednesday, Midjourney banned all employees from image synthesis rival Stability AI from its service indefinitely after it detected “botnet-like” activity suspected to be a Stability employee attempting to scrape prompt and image pairs in bulk. Midjourney advocate Nick St. Pierre tweeted about the announcement, which came via Midjourney’s official Discord channel.
↫ Benj Edwards

So “AI” companies are allowed to ingest whatever data they want, but as soon as someone ingests their data, it’s suddenly a problem?

Seems like a sound business model.