Figma, a popular design app, is facing controversy over a new AI feature it launched that produced designs resembling Apple’s Weather app. The company has now temporarily disabled it.
The feature, called Make Designs, was intended to help designers create new user interface designs for their apps by generating suggestions based on a text prompt. However, whenever asked to generate a design for a weather app, Figma’s new AI tool consistently produced a design that closely resembled Apple’s Weather app.
The first to raise the issue was Andy Allen, CEO of Not Boring Software, who tweeted that he was “pretty sure” Figma was using Apple’s Weather app as a training example for its AI.
Figma AI looks rather heavily trained on existing apps.
— Andy Allen (@asallen) July 1, 2024
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
In a thread on X, Figma CEO Dylan Field acknowledged that “the Make Design feature is not trained on Figma content, community files or app designs”. He also claimed that the accusations about data training made by Andy Allen were false.
Figma has since taken down the Make Designs feature and acknowledged the issue in a support article:
“This feature, which is part of Figma AI, is powered by off-the-shelf models and a bespoke design system commissioned by Figma. We recently learned of an issue caused by the underlying design system. “
At the time of writing this article, Make Designs still hasn’t come back online.
Apple, which has recently provided Figma designers with an updated UI kit, hasn’t commented on the issue.