Wednesday, one week after Figma common a prompt-to-design it generator called Make Design, the company decided to discontinue the tool. Reason? Make Design created what looked like direct copies of the of Apple iOS weather app.
Andy Allen, founder of NotBoring Software and one of the early adopters invited to test Make Design, first with a flag publication in X on Monday.
When Allen tested the “weather app” with Make Designs, the AI tool produced three results that looked identical to Apple's Weather app for the iPhone.
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Allen asks for more triedas “exciting, interesting, most joyful weather app, 3D, real-time rendering, playful colors, smart interactions, gestures, clean typography” gave the same result.
He noted that “Figma AI seems quite trained on existing applications” and said designers using the feature to “fully vet existing apps” to avoid legal trouble.
Figma AI seems pretty trained on existing apps.
This is a “weather app” using the new Make Designs feature, and the results are essentially 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 DECLARING on Tuesday that allegations about Allen's training records were “false” and that Make Design “has not been trained on Figma content, community files or app designs.”
If the AI tool wasn't designed into existing apps, then how did it know to mimic the Apple Weather app so closely? According to Field, the problem was with the AI tool's design systems, not the training data.
Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Figma CTO Kris Rasmussen weighed in on the controversy in a Tuesday's interview with The Verge. Rather than deny outright that Make Design was trained in other applications, Rasmussen said he couldn't say for sure. He added that Figma had no role in training the AI behind the tool.
“We didn't do any training as part of the AI's generative features,” Rasmussen told the publication, a statement he echoed in 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 found.
both OpenAI AND Amazon have been accused of using copyrighted work to train their models.
Make Design will become available again after the Figma team performs a full QA test on the design systems, according to Field. The tool has also received opposite reaction by designers for its potential to eliminate jobs.
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