Figma withdraws AI tool after criticism that it stole Apple’s design

Figma’s new Make Designs tool allows users to quickly create apps using generative AI. Now, it has been taken down after the tool came up with designs that looked too much like Apple’s iOS weather app. Figma CEO Dylan Field posted a topic on X Details on Tuesday morning the removalputting the blame on yourself for pushing the team to meet a deadlineand defending the company’s approach to developing its AI tools.

In Posts in X, Andy Allen, CEO of Not Boring Software, showed how close Figma’s Make Designs tool has made near replicas of Apple’s weather app. “Just a warning to all designers using the new Make Designs feature that you may want to fully check existing apps or heavily modify the results so you don’t unknowingly get yourself into legal trouble,” Allen wrote.

In an interview Tuesday with Figma CTO Kris Rasmussen, I asked him directly whether Make Designs was trained in Apple app designs. Your answer? He couldn’t say for sure. Figma was not responsible for training the AI ​​models it used.

“We haven’t done any training as part of the generative AI capabilities,” Rasmussen said. The features are “powered by out-of-the-box templates and a custom design system we commissioned, which appears to be the underlying problem.”

This generally corresponds with something he said on Monday on X in response to a user who suggested that Make Designs was trained on existing applications. “As we shared when we launched Figma AI last week, there was no training as part of this feature or any of our generative features,” He wrote. “We are looking at the extent to which the similarities are a function of the third-party models we use versus the design systems we have commissioned for the models to use and will address as necessary.”

Field, in his own thread, said it the Make Designs feature “is not trained on Figma content, community files, or app designs” and noted that “the accusations about data training in this tweet are false.” He said one problem with the company’s approach is that “variability is very low.”

The main AI models powering Make Designs are OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Amazon’s Titan Image Generator G1, according to Rasmussen. If it’s true that Figma hasn’t trained its AI tools, but they’re pushing Apple-like apps anyway, that could suggest that OpenAI or Amazon’s models were trained on Apple’s designs. OpenAI and Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Rasmussen argued that Figma didn’t want to do any training to improve its features until it was open to users about its AI training policies, which it also presented last week. As part of these policies, users have until August 15th to decide whether or not they want to allow their content to be used in Figma training. (Starter and Professional plans are turned on by default, while Organization and Enterprise plans are turned off by default.)

I asked if Figma plans to train its own models — which, given the company’s situation new AI training policies, it seems like something that is going to happen. “We definitely see opportunities to really improve their design workflows by teaching these models how to design in the context of Figma,” said Rasmussen. However, “we will take steps to ensure that our own models or any fine-tuning we do with open source models only learn general design patterns and Figma-specific design concepts so they can be better tools for professional designers.”

I also asked Rasmussen how Figma plans to fix its processes to detect potential problems in the future. “We are going over the custom design system to ensure it has enough variation and meets our quality standards,” he said. “This is the root cause of the problem. But we will take additional precautions before reactivating [Make Designs] to ensure the entire resource meets our quality standards and is consistent with our values.”

Rasmussen also pointed to the fact that Make Designs is in beta. “Betas, by definition, are not perfect. But it’s safe to say, as Dylan shared in his tweet, that we just don’t understand this particular issue. And we should have done that.”

Rasmussen said Figma hopes to revive Make Designs “soon.” Other Figma AI features will continue to be available in beta. (To access any of Figma’s AI features, you need to sign up for a waitlist.)

Figma is the latest company to come under scrutiny for its approach to bringing AI to its creative tools. Adobe had to make it clear that it would not use its work to train its AI after the backlash to its terms of service changes. And Meta had to change its AI labels after photographers complained that its old label was incorrectly applied to real photos.