Figma’s new Make Designs tool allows users to quickly create app models using generative AI. It has now been pulled after the tool produced designs that looked strikingly similar to Apple’s weather app for iOS. Figma CEO Dylan Field posted an X thread early Tuesday morning detailing the removal, blaming himself for pushing the team to meet a deadline and defending the company’s approach to developing its AI tools.
In a post on X, Andy Allen, CEO of Not Boring Software, showed how accurately Figma’s Make Designs tool made near-duplicates of Apple’s Weather app. “Just a heads up to any designers using the new design feature that you may want to double check existing apps or heavily modify the results so you don’t unwittingly get yourself into legal trouble,” Allen wrote.
In an interview Tuesday with Figma CTO Chris Rasmussen, I asked him point-blank if Make Designs was trained in Apple app design. His response? He couldn’t say for sure. Figma was not at all responsible for training the AI models it used.
“We didn’t do training as part of the AI’s generative functions,” Rasmussen said. The features are “driven by off-the-shelf models and a custom design system that we ordered, which seems to be the main problem.”
This broadly matches something he said on Monday on X in response to a user who suggested that Make Designs trained on existing apps. “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 investigating the extent to which the similarities are a function of the third-party models we use versus the design systems we have commissioned to be used by the models, and will review as appropriate.”
Field said in his own thread that the Make Designs feature “was not trained on Figma content, community files, or app designs” and noted that “the allegations surrounding data training in this tweet are false.” He said the problem with the company’s approach is that “volatility is too low.”
The key 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 spewing out Apple-like apps anyway, that could suggest that OpenAI or Amazon’s models have been trained on Apple’s designs. OpenAI and Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rasmussen claims that Figma doesn’t want to do any training to improve its features until it’s open with its users about its AI training policies, which it also unveiled last week. As part of these policies, users have until August 15 to decide whether or not they want to opt-in to allow their content to be used for Figma training. (The Starter and Professional plans are turned on by default, while the Organization and Enterprise plans are turned off by default.)
I asked if Figma plans to train its own models — which, given the company’s new AI training policies, seems like something that will happen. “We definitely see opportunities to really advance your design workflows by teaching these models how to design in the context of Figma,” Rasmussen said. 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 specific Figma design concepts so that they can be -good tools for professional designers.”
I also asked Rasmussen how Figma plans to adjust its processes to catch potential problems in the future. “We are making the transition to 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 extra precautions before reactivating [Make Designs] to ensure that the entire function meets our quality standards and aligns with our values.”
Rasmussen also pointed out the fact that Make Designs is in beta. “Betas are by definition not perfect. But it’s safe to say, as Dylan shared in his tweet, that we just didn’t understand this particular problem. And we should have.”
Rasmussen said Figma expects to reactivate Make Designs “soon.” Other Figma AI features will continue to be available in beta. (To access any of Figma AI’s features, you must register on a waiting list.)
Figma is the latest company to come under scrutiny for its approach to bringing AI into its creative tools. Adobe should have made it clear that it will not use your work to train its AI after the backlash to the terms of service changes. And Meta had to change its AI tags after photographers complained that the old tag was incorrectly applied to real photos.
