The technology design company Figma has pulled an AI-powered app creator, after accusations that the tool was ripping off Apple’s weather app.
The chief executive of the company, which was the target of a $20bn takeover attempt by Adobe until EU and UK regulators opposed it, defended the tool against accusations of plagiarism on social media, but accepted that the company had “missed the mark” due to an issue “related to the underlying design systems”.
Known as Make Designs, the AI tool launched by Figma allows users to enter a plain English description of an app they want to create, and watch as the user interface is generated out of thin air.
But shortly after it launched, Andy Allen, the founder of the iOS app developer Not Boring Software, discovered that multiple requests to design a weather app repeatedly resulted in a program that was almost identical to the built-in iOS weather app that appears on Apple devices.
“This is a ‘weather app’ using the new Make Designs feature and the results are basically Apple’s Weather app,” Allen said in a post on X this week. “Tried three times, same results.”
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
On Tuesday, Figma’s chief executive, Dylan Field, posted a defence of the company’s feature. Despite appearances, Field said, the tool was not created by training an AI system on work done using the Figma app by other customers. “The Make Design feature is not trained on Figma content, community files or app designs,” he said, calling claims that the service was trained on existing apps “false”.
Instead, the service used “off the shelf” large language models to instruct a more hand-coded “design system”, he said. Rather than designing the app from scratch, in other words, the AI system simply built an app using an algorithmic toolkit put together by Figma’s own designers. But that approach meant that “variability is too low”, Field accepted.
“Within hours of seeing this tweet, we identified the issue, which was related to the underlying design systems that were created. Ultimately, it is my fault for not insisting on a better [quality assurance] process for this work and pushing our team hard to hit a deadline for [Figma’s annual conference] Config.
“I hate missing the mark, especially on something that I believe is so fundamentally important to the future of design,” Field added.
Adobe made a $20bn (£15.6bn) takeover bid for Figma in 2022 as its collaboration-focused suite of design tools began to represent a viable competitor to Adobe’s market-leading Creative Suite. But in 2023, the attempted merger was called off, with regulators in the EU and UK effectively blocking it for fear it would eliminate competition in the “product design software market”.
“There is no clear path to receive necessary regulatory approvals from the European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority,” the companies said in the joint statement in December. Adobe paid a $1bn termination fee to Figma after the collapse of the deal.
Figma has been contacted for comment.
