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Where there’s AI, there’s news. Many firms are jumping on the bullet-fast AI train, and so is Figma. Recently, the company introduced AI features to improve user experience on their platform.

However, their efforts fell short of expectations and instead, it grabbed the spotlight for copying from Apple! This ultimately led the firm to take down this feature soon after its release. Let’s quickly understand what happened in detail, so keep reading!

What is Figma?

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Credit: https://www.figma.com/ai/

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For those new to this design tool or who have merely heard of it, here’s a quick introduction for you. Figma is a collaborative tech tool. It helps users make, test and share innovative designs for digital products, websites, mobile apps, etc. In short, when it comes to user interface (UI) design, Figma is a go-to option for most people.

A little business fun fact here is that only 11% of designers used Figma in 2017, and this rapidly grew over the years. Fast forward to today, this design tool sits at 41.46% market share, being the top choice while beating notable rivals like Adobe according to data by 6sense.com.

Did Figma copy from Apple?

Figma recently released several AI features to their platform to help users enhance their productivity and experience. This includes Visual Search, Rename Layers and Make Designs but one of these tools was taken down by the firm and here’s why.

Make Designs located at the action panel helps designers make UI layouts and drafts from text prompts. However, the founder of NotBoring Software, Andy Allen pointed out similarities of Figma’s AI outputs with Apple’s iOS weather app in a post on X (previously Twitter). He stated that this tool created weather app designs that were quite similar to Apple’s app and it seemed Figma had trained its AI on existing apps.

Later on, the CEO of Figma, Dylan Field shared a thread on X informing everyone of the removal of Make Designs while clarifying that the company does not train the AI models.

Speaking to The Verge, CTO, Kris Rasmussen revealed that their tool was built on OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Amazon’s Titan Image Generator G1. So, it is possible that OpenAI and Amazon trained their models on Apple’s designs. 

According to Figma’s blog, its AI features are powered by third-party and out-of-the-box AI models. They also stated that no private Figma files or customer data were utilised to train the AI models. When it comes to data privacy, Figma encrypts all information and has robust security layers to protect sensitive data.

Will ‘Make Designs’ return?

The short answer is yes. Kris Rasmussen informed us that ‘Make Designs’ was released in beta mode and expects it to be re-enabled soon. When it comes to other AI features released by Figma, they are also in beta mode and available to use via a waitlist.

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The takeaway

AI mistakes are not new. From Microsoft to Adobe and Meta, many firms have received backlash for it. While Figma tried to benefit from the AI trend, its Make Design feature missed the issue of creating replicas. In the design world, copying materials can land you in big legal trouble so hopefully Figma will launch a better version of the feature.