Dylan Field, CEO of Figma said The company will temporarily disable its “Make Design” AI feature that allegedly copied designs from Apple’s weather app. The problem was initially spotted by Andy Allen, the founder of NotBoring Software, which offers a suite of apps that includes a customizable weather app and other utilities. While testing Figma’s tool, he found that it repeatedly replicated Apple’s weather app when used as a design aid.
Allen had taken Xformerly Twitter, to accuse the company of “heavily” training its tool on existing applications — an accusation Field now denies.
The AI feature “Make Designs” was introduced in Figma Config Conference Last Weekwhere the company explained that it had not been trained on Figma content, community files, or app designs, Field notes in his response on X.
“In other words, the accusations around data manipulation in this tweet are false,” he said.
The Make Design feature is available in Figma’s software and generates layouts and UI components from text prompts. The company explained at the time of its launch: “Simply describe what you need and the feature will provide you with a first draft.”
The idea was that developers could use the feature to help them quickly write down their ideas so they could start exploring different design directions and then arrive at a solution more quickly, Figma said.
But in its rush to launch new AI features to stay competitive, the quality assurance work that should accompany the new additions appears to have been neglected.
Similar to complaints in other industries, some designers immediately argued that Figma’s AI tools, like Make Design, would eliminate jobs by bringing digital design to the mass market, while others against that AI would simply help eliminate much of the repetitive work required for design, allowing more interesting ideas to emerge.
Allen Discovery The fact that Figma appears to essentially copy other apps, however, has sparked increased concern within the design community.
“Just a warning to any designers using the new Make Designs feature: you may want to carefully review existing applications or significantly modify the results so you don’t unknowingly find yourself in legal trouble,” Allen warned on X.
Field responded by clarifying that Make Design uses off-the-shelf LLMs (large language models), combined with “systems that we commission to be used by those models.” He said the problem with this approach is that the variability is too low.
“Within hours of seeing (Allen’s) tweet, we identified the issue, which was related to the underlying design systems that were created,” Field wrote on X. “Ultimately, it’s my fault for not pushing for a better QA process for this work and not pushing our team to meet a deadline for Config.”
Field said Figma will temporarily disable the Make Design feature until the team is confident it can “guarantee its outcome.” The feature will be disabled starting today, Tuesday, July 2, and will not be re-enabled until Figma completes a full QA of the feature’s underlying design system.
