Figma recently pulled its “Make Designs” generative AI tool after a user discovered that asking it to design a weather app would spit out something suspiciously similar to Apple’s weather app — a result that could, among other things, land a user in legal trouble. This also suggested that Figma may have trained the feature on Apple’s designs, and while CEO Dylan Field was quick to say that the company didn’t train the tool on Figma content or app designs, the company has now released a full statement in a company blog post. The statement said Figma “thoroughly reviewed” Make Designs' underlying design system during development and as part of the private beta. "But in the week leading up to Config, new components and example screens were added that we just didn't control closely enough," writes Noah Levine, Figma's VP of Product Design. "Some of these features resemble aspects of real-world applications and appear in function output with certain hints."

When Figma discovered a problem with the design system, "we removed the feature from the design system that caused the similarity and disabled that feature," Levin said. The company is working on "enhanced quality assurance processes" before bringing Make Designs back, though Levin did not provide a timeline. (CTO Chris Rasmussen said in an interview with The Verge earlier this month that the company plans to bring the feature back "soon").

Figma launched Make Designs in limited beta as part of the Config event announcement, but Apple's similar designs were released for X soon after. . In our interview, Rasmussen said that Figma simply hasn't trained the AI ​​models that power the tool, including OpenAI's GPT-4o and Amazon's Titan Image Generator G1. In the blog post, Levine also describes the design framework that powers the tool.