Earlier this month, Figma AI debuted as a set of tools to help designers with their work, but things quickly went awry: When a designer asked Figma AI for help designing a weather app, its “Make a Design” feature tried multiple times, but it ended up creating a clone of Apple’s Weather app.
After the incident hit the news, Figma immediately suspended Make Design until a full investigation was completed, and now the company has outlined what went wrong and how it’s responding to it.
Writing on the Figma blog, Noah Levin said:
To give the model the freedom to create designs from a wide range of domains, we commissioned two large design systems (one for mobile, one for desktop) with hundreds of components, as well as examples of different ways these components can be assembled to derive outputs.
[…]
We carefully reviewed our underlying design system throughout development and our private beta. However, in the week leading up to Config, new components and example screens were added that we hadn’t fully validated. Some of those assets resembled aspects of real-world applications and appeared in the feature output at certain prompts. We first noticed this issue when designer Andy Allen, who spoke at Config, pointed out that prompting Make Designs for his weather app resulted in a design that was very similar to Apple’s first-party apps.
Essentially, Figma claims that the last asset additions to the design system are the cause of the errors: The Make Design tool was reportedly working fine until these new components were added.
What Figma doesn’t reveal is where these new components come from. Could Apple’s design assets be involved? The company has previously vigorously denied that allegation.
But strangely, Figma has yet to relaunch its Make Design feature… at least for now.
If the issue was truly caused by later-added assets, it would seem like an easy fix, but perhaps the company is simply taking the time for a more thorough review and beta period than it did initially.
Apparently, as this incident proved, that’s not a bad idea.
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