Figma CEO Dylan Field says the company will temporarily disable its “Make Design” AI feature, which was said to be copying designs from Apple’s own Weather app. The issue was first spotted by Andy Allen, the founder of NotBoring Software, which makes a suite of apps that includes a popular Weather app with customization and other utilities. When testing Figma’s tool, he found that it repeatedly reproduced Apple’s Weather app when used as a design aid.
Allen had taken to X, formerly Twitter, to accuse Figma of “heavily” training its tool on existing apps, an accusation Field now denies.
The Make Design feature is available within Figma’s software and will generate UI designs and components from text prompts. “You just need to describe what you need and the feature will provide you with a first draft,” is how the company explained it when it launched the feature.
The idea was that developers could use the feature to help get their ideas down quickly to start exploring different design directions and then arrive at a solution faster, Figma said.
The feature was introduced at Figma’s Config conference last week, where the company explained that it received no training on Figma content, community files, or app designs, Field notes in his response on X.
“In other words, the allegations about data training in this tweet are false,” he said.
But in its rush to release new AI features to remain competitive, the quality control work that should accompany new additions appears to have been overlooked.
Following complaints from other industries, some designers immediately argued that Figma’s AI tools, like Make Design, would eliminate jobs by bringing digital design to the mass market, while others countered that AI would simply help eliminate much of the repetitive work involved in design, allowing more interesting ideas to emerge.
Allen’s discovery that Figma appeared to be essentially copying other apps raised further concerns among the design community.
“Just a heads up for all designers using the new Create Designs feature: you may want to double-check existing applications or heavily tweak the results so you don’t unwittingly get into legal trouble,” Allen warned others on X.
Field responded by clarifying that Make Design uses large, off-the-shelf language models, combined with “systems that we commission to use these models.” He said the problem with this approach is that the variability is too low.
“Within a few hours of seeing [Allen’s] “In a tweet, we identified the issue, which was related to the underlying design systems that were built,” Field wrote on X. “Ultimately, it’s my fault for not insisting on a better QA process for this work and pressuring our team to meet a deadline for setup.”
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 outcome.” The feature will be disabled starting Tuesday and will not be re-enabled until Figma has completed a full QA on the feature’s underlying design system.