Figma Pulls AI Tool Amid Apple Controversy

Figma has disabled its new Make Designs feature, introduced at the company’s Config conference last week, that lets users mock up apps using generative AI. The tool produced designs similar to Apple’s iOS weather app, stirring controversy among users and the public. Figma said it will re-enable Make Designs “soon.”

Andy Allen, CEO of Not Boring Software, shared side-by-side shots on X of Figma’s Make Designs tool creations and Apple’s weather app. “Figma AI looks rather heavily trained on existing apps,” he wrote, suggesting Figma ripped off Apple’s design and warning designers to “thoroughly check existing apps or modify the results heavily” to avoid legal trouble.

Figma’s CEO, Dylan Field, took responsibility for the incident, blaming himself for not insisting on a more thorough QA process and pressing the team to meet a deadline for Config.

In an interview after the incident led by The Verge’s Jay Peters, Figma’s CTO Kris Rasmussen was asked whether Make Designs was trained on Apple’s app designs. Surprisingly, he couldn’t provide a straight answer.

“We did no training as part of the generative AI features,” Rasmussen said. The features are “powered by off-the-shelf models and a bespoke design system that we commissioned, which appears to be the underlying issue.”

With Figma denying all responsibility related to AI training, the blame shifts to the creators of the AI models GPT-4o and Titan Image Generator G1 that power the tool, in this case, OpenAI and Amazon. This could suggest that OpenAI or Amazon have trained their models on Apple’s designs, but the companies have yet to tell their side of the story.

Figma’s AI ripping off Apple’s design is yet another controversy that raises the question of how ethical AI-assisted creative work is. Other AI-forward companies have also found themselves under scrutiny over similar issues. Meta, for example, had to change its AI labels after photographers complained about the incorrect application of its old AI label to real photos.

Aside from the recent controversy, Figma has been ranked the #1 UI design tool of choice by designers for four consecutive years and has over 4 million active monthly users. The company is consistently working on new features and improvements, including a dedicated Figma plugin for Wix, which allows users to export Figma designs to Wix Studio sites.