Earlier this month, Figma was forced to suspend its AI assistant for designers, Make Designs, after the assistant began creating projects for users that were very similar to Apple’s iOS apps. Now, the company’s specialists have looked into the matter and explained why the neural network was creating such projects.
Image source: Figma
Using app designs that resemble Apple products could lead to legal trouble, so Figma platform users expressed dissatisfaction with the software solution. In addition, the incident suggests that Figma’s neural network may have been trained on designs from Apple and other companies. It turned out that the problem arose because Figma engineers did not properly test the components added to the generative neural network.
Figma’s announcement notes that the company “carefully studied” Make Designs’ underlying systems during the development of the algorithm and during beta testing. However, in the week before the neural network was released to the public, new components and sample layouts were added to the configuration that had not been properly tested. The company acknowledges that some of these components were similar to real-world applications and were the result of the AI algorithm processing certain user requests.
Once Figma became aware of the design algorithm issue, the components that were the source of the generated content resembling real apps were removed. The company is currently continuing to work on improving quality control, after which Make Designs will be made publicly available again. No specific timeline was given for when the AI assistant will be publicly available again.
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