Dylan Field, CEO of Figma, says the company will briefly turn off its “Make Design” AI feature, which was accused of copying the looks of Apple’s own Weather app. Andy Allen, founder of NotBoring Software, was the first person to notice the problem. NotBoring Software makes a suite of apps that includes a famous Weather app that can be customized and other useful apps. He tested Figma’s tool and found that when it was used as a design aid, it would constantly copy Apple’s Weather app.
Allen went on X, which used to be Twitter, to say that Figma was “heavily” training its tool on other apps, which Field now rejects.
Figma’s software has a tool called “Make Design” that will make UI (user interface) layouts and components from text prompts. When the feature first came out, the company said, “Just describe what you need, and the feature will give you a first draft.”
Figma said that the feature was meant to help developers quickly write down their ideas so that they could start exploring different design directions and then come up with a solution more quickly.
Last week, the company showed off the new feature at Figma’s Config conference, but Field says in his answer on X that it wasn’t trained on Figma material, community files, or app designs.
He said, “To put it another way, the claims made in this tweet about data training are not true.”
But in its haste to add new AI features to stay competitive, it seems to have forgotten to do the quality testing work that should go along with them.
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— Web3 AI/ML (@Web3AIML) July 2, 2024Figma CEO Dylan Field halts "Make Design" AI feature amid concerns it replicated Apple's Weather app designs. Temporarily disabled for QA improvements. #figmaai #AIfeatures #DesignEthics #Appleweatherapp pic.twitter.com/ur6xJj7jzT
Similar to complaints in other fields, some designers said right away that Figma’s AI tools, like Make Design, would eliminate jobs by making digital design available to everyone. Others said that AI would only help get rid of a lot of the boring work that went into design, making room for more creative ideas.
People in the design community became more worried when Allen found that Figma seemed to be copying other apps.
Allen told people on X, “Just so you know, designers using the new Make Designs feature might want to check out existing apps or heavily change the results so that you don’t get yourself in legal trouble without meaning to.”
Field replied that Make Design uses “systems we commissioned to be used by these models” along with “off-the-shelf large language models.” He said this method is flawed because there is not enough variation.
“Within hours of seeing Allen’s tweet, we figured out what the problem was: it had to do with the design systems that were used,” Field wrote on X. “In the end, it’s my fault that I didn’t ask for a better quality assurance process for this work and push our team hard to meet the Config deadline.”
Apple wasn’t available right away to react. Figma said what it thought about the situation based on Field’s tweets.
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Field says that the Make Design tool will be turned off for now until the team is sure that it can “stand behind its output.” The feature will be turned off on Tuesday and won’t be turned back on until Figma has finished a full QA pass on the design system that the feature is based on.
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