Figma CEO Dylan Field said the company would temporarily disable its AI feature “Make Design” after it allegedly plagiarized the design of Apple's weather app. The issue was first discovered by Andy Allen, founder of NotBoring Software, which makes a suite of apps including a popular skinnable weather app and other utilities. After testing Figma's tool, Allen found that it repeatedly replicated Apple's weather app when used as a design aid.
Allen accused Figma of “extensively” training its tools on existing apps, a charge Field now denies.
The Make Design feature is available within Figma's software and generates UI (user interface) layouts and components from text prompts: “Just describe what you want, and the feature will give you a first draft,” the company explained when the feature was released.
Figma says the aim of the feature is to enable developers to quickly jot down ideas, explore different design directions, and arrive at a solution faster.
The feature was announced at Figma's Config conference last week, but the company explained that it wasn't training on Figma's content, community files or app designs, Field said in a response to X.
“In other words, the accusations about data training in this tweet are false,” he said.
However, in the rush to introduce new AI capabilities to stay competitive, the quality assurance work that should accompany adding new features appears to have been neglected.
Echoing complaints from other industries, some designers were quick to argue that Figma's AI tools, like Make Design, would take away jobs by bringing digital design to the mass market, while others countered that AI only helps eliminate much of the repetitive work required for design and generate more interesting ideas.
Or perhaps it will eliminate much of the repetition in design and raise the bar, allowing new and interesting ideas to emerge, just as new tools always do.
Those that don’t invest in design won’t, and those that do will continue to invest. And the truth is, there’s usually a whole lot going on…
— Dustin Karp (@digitdustin) June 26, 2024
Allen's discovery that Figma appears to essentially copy other apps raised concerns among the design community.
“To all designers using the new design creation feature, we encourage you to thoroughly review your existing apps or make significant changes to the results to avoid unknowingly getting yourself into legal trouble,” Allen wrote in a warning to other users on X.
Field responded by clarifying that Make Design uses a combination of off-the-shelf large-scale language models and “the systems that we commission these models to use.” The problem with this approach, he said, is that it's too unreliable.
(4) We asked our team to temporarily disable the Make Design feature until we were confident in the outcome. The feature will be disabled when the US team wakes up in a few hours, and will be re-enabled once the product has completed a full QA pass.
— Dylan Field (@zoink) July 2, 2024
“A few hours later [Allen’s] “In a tweet, I identified issues related to the foundational design system that was being created,” Field wrote to X. “Ultimately, it is my fault for not insisting on a better QA process for this work and not pushing the team harder to meet the Config deadline.”
Apple was not immediately available for comment, and Figma cited a tweet from Field as its statement on the matter.
Field said Figma will temporarily disable the Make Design feature until it feels confident that teams can “take responsibility for the deliverables.” The feature will be disabled starting Tuesday and won't be re-enabled until Figma completes a full QA pass of the design system that the feature is based on.