Figma CEO Dylan Field says the company will temporarily disable its “Make Design” AI feature, which is said to be ripping off the design of Apple’s own Weather app. The problem was first noticed by Andy Allen, the founder of NotBoring Software, which makes a suite of apps that includes a popular clothing-enabled weather app and other utilities. Testing Figma’s tool, he found that it repeatedly replicated Apple’s Weather app when used as a design aid.
Allen took to X, formerly of Twitter, to accuse Figma of “severely” training its tool on existing apps – a charge Field now denies.
The Make Design feature is available within the Figma software and will generate UI (User Interface) layouts and components from text prompts. “Just describe what you need and the feature will provide you with a first draft,” is how the company explained it when the feature launched.
The idea was that developers could use the feature to help bring their ideas to life quickly, to start exploring different design directions and then arrive at a solution more quickly, Figma said.
The feature was introduced at Figma’s Config conference last week, where the company explained that it is not trained in Figma content, community files or app design, Field notes in his response to X.
“In other words, the allegations surrounding data learning in this tweet are false,” he said.
But in the rush to roll out new AI features to stay competitive, the quality assurance work that should accompany new additions seems to have been overlooked.
Echoing complaints in other industries, some designers were quick to argue that Figma’s AI tools, such as Make Design, would destroy jobs by bringing digital design to the mass market, while others countered that AI would simply help eliminate much of the repetitive work that goes into the design, allowing more interesting ideas to emerge.
Allen’s discovery that Figma essentially appears to copy other apps has led to increased concern among the design community.
“Just a heads up to any designers using the new Make Designs feature that you may want to double check existing applications or heavily alter the results so you don’t unwittingly get yourself into legal trouble,” Allen warned others at X.
Field responded by clarifying that Make Design uses off-the-shelf large language models combined with “systems that we’ve commissioned to be used by those models.” He said the problem with this approach is that the volatility is too low.
“Within hours of seeing [Allen’s] tweet, we identified the problem that was related to the underlying design systems that were built,” Field wrote to X. “Ultimately it’s my fault for not pushing for a better QA process for this work and pushing our team to hit a Config deadline.”
Apple was not immediately available for comment. Figma cited Field’s tweets as its statement on the matter.
Field says Figma will temporarily disable the Make Design feature until the team is confident it can “stand behind its results.” The feature will be disabled starting Tuesday and won’t be re-enabled until Figma completes a full QA run of the feature’s core design system.
