On Wednesday, a week after Figma shared a prompt-to-design AI generator called Make Design, the company decided to pause the tool. The reason? Make Design created what looked like direct copies of Apple’s iOS Weather app.
Andy Allen, founder of NotBoring Software and one of the early users invited to test Make Design, first flagged the issue on X on Monday.
When Allen tried the prompt “weather app” with Make Designs, the AI tool churned out three results that looked identical to Apple’s Weather app for iPhone.
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Other prompts Allen tried, like “exciting, interesting, most joyous weather app, 3D, real-time rendering, playful colors, clever interactions, gestures, clean typography” yielded the same result.
He noted that “Figma AI looks rather heavily trained on existing apps” and told designers using the feature to “thoroughly check existing apps” to avoid legal trouble.
Figma AI looks rather heavily trained on existing apps.
This is a “weather app” using the new Make Designs feature and the results are basically Apple’s Weather app (left). Tried three times, same results. https://t.co/Ij20OpPCer pic.twitter.com/psFTV6daVD
— Andy Allen (@asallen) July 1, 2024
Figma CEO Dylan Field stated on Tuesday that Allen’s training data accusations were “false” and that Make Design “is not trained on Figma content, community files, or app designs.”
If the AI tool wasn’t designed on existing apps, then how did it know to mimic the Apple Weather app so closely? According to Field, the issue was with the AI tool’s design systems, not with the training data.
Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Figma CTO Kris Rasmussen weighed in on the controversy in a Tuesday interview with The Verge. Instead of denying outright that Make Design was trained on other apps, Rasmussen said he couldn’t say for sure. He added that Figma had no part in training the AI behind the tool.
“We did no training as part of the generative AI features,” Rasmussen told the publication, a statement he echoed on X.
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OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Amazon’s Titan Image Generator G1 were the two main AI models behind Make Design, Rasmussen disclosed.
Both OpenAI and Amazon have been accused of using copyrighted work to train their models.
Make Design will become available again after Figma’s team conducts a full quality assurance test on the design systems, according to Field. The tool has also received backlash from designers for its potential to eliminate jobs.
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