Figma CEO Dylan Field has announced that the company will be temporarily deactivating its “Make Design” AI feature following allegations that it was copying designs from Apple’s Weather app.
The issue was brought to light by Andy Allen, the creator of NotBoring Software, who discovered that Figma’s tool was consistently replicating Apple’s Weather app when used for design purposes.
Allen had turned to X, to allege that Figma heavily trained its tool on existing apps. The field is now denying this accusation.
Figma’s software includes the Make Design feature, which can create UI layouts and components based on text descriptions.
The company described it as, “Simply explain what you want, and the feature will generate an initial draft for you,” when it was first introduced.
Developers intended to utilize the feature to swiftly capture their ideas and start exploring various design possibilities, ultimately reaching a solution more efficiently, according to Figma.
The feature was unveiled at Figma’s Config conference last week, during which the company clarified that it was not trained on Figma content, community files, or app designs, as noted in Field’s response on X.
“He stated that the allegations regarding data training in this tweet are untrue. However, in their rush to introduce new AI features to stay ahead in the market, it appears that the necessary quality assurance work for these new additions may have been neglected.”
Similar to complaints in other fields, a few designers quickly contended that Figma’s AI tools, such as Make Design, could result in job loss by making digital design accessible to the general public.
On the other hand, some argued that AI would only assist in reducing the tedious tasks involved in design, thus enabling more innovative concepts to surface.
Allen’s realization that Figma appeared to be imitating other apps caused a rise in worry within the design community.
“Be cautious if you’re using the new Make Designs feature as you might need to carefully review existing apps or make significant changes to avoid any potential legal issues,” Allen cautioned fellow designers on X.
Field clarified that Make Design utilizes pre-existing large language models in combination with systems that they have specifically developed for use with these models. He explained that the issue with this method is that the variability is insufficient.
“After seeing [Allen’s] tweet, we quickly identified the issue, which was related to the design systems that were created,” Field stated on X.
“Ultimately, I take responsibility for not demanding a better QA process for this work and pushing our team to meet the Config deadline.”
Apple was not immediately available for a response. Figma referred to Field’s tweets as its official statement on the issue.
Field announced that Figma will temporarily deactivate the Make Design feature until the team is confident in its quality.
The feature will be disabled starting Tuesday and will only be reactivated after Figma has completed a thorough QA assessment of the underlying design system.
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