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NuoN, the bot account in question, has followed nearly a million artists in just a few days.
UPD: In response to Jon Lam's tweet, NuoN's account was banned by the ArtStation team:
The original article: In the last few days, multiple Digital Artists have raised a red flag about a highly suspicious ArtStation account, warning that it is most likely a data-scraping bot belonging to Midjourney, which the company uses to train the algorithms of its image-generative AI.
Brought to our attention by Jon Lam, a Digital Artist and anti-scraping activist, the account in question, known as NuoN, may seem innocent at first glance, but the more you delve into it, the more suspicious it becomes. With a complete lack of information in the bio (strike one) and the use of Midjourney's official logo as the account's avatar (strike two), NuoN is following nearly a million artists (strike three), raising concerns that their works might be unwittingly fueling the soulless algorithms of an AI.
The suggestion that NuoN serves as a tool for AI developers to train their models gains additional support when we consider Midjourney's business strategy in general, which was also highlighted by Jon Lam a couple of weeks ago.
According to a series of screenshots shared by Lam, the company was caught discussing activities such as laundering and creating a database of artists, whom they reduced to mere styles, for training Midjourney. "They bragged about their art heist on Discord, I'm sure scraping artists in real-time on ArtStation isn't beneath them," commented Lam.
While it is currently unconfirmed whether this account is actually Midjourney's data-scraping bot or not, there is an idea floating around that Midjourney's logo as the avatar is nothing more than a red herring, it is evident that something fishy is indeed going on here, and if you are an artist who shares their works on ArtStation, it would be in your best interest to block NuoN as soon as possible, just in case. You can find the account in question and block it by clicking this link.
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