Figma explains why AI kept making copies of Apple’s Weather app

Earlier this month, after Figma AI debuted as a set of tools for aiding designers’ process, things quickly went wrong. A designer asked Figma AI’s ‘Make Design’ feature to help him design a weather app, and on every one of his multiple tries, it produced a clone of Apple’s Weather app.

After the mishap made the news, Figma immediately disabled Make Design until a full investigation could be completed. Now, the company has outlined what went wrong and what they’re doing about it.

Noah Levin, writing for Figma’s blog:

To give the model enough freedom to compose designs from a wide variety of domains, we commissioned two extensive design systems (one for mobile and one for desktop) with hundreds of components, as well as examples of different ways these components can be assembled to guide the output.

[…]

We carefully reviewed the underlying design systems throughout the course of development and during a private beta. But in the week leading up to Config, new components and example screens were added that we simply didn’t vet carefully enough. A few of those assets were similar to aspects of real world applications, and appeared in the output of the feature with certain prompts. We first realized the issue when Andy Allen, a designer who spoke at Config, pointed out that prompting Make Designs for a weather app resulted in designs that felt very similar to Apple’s first-party app.

Essentially, Figma is chalking the error up to some last-minute asset additions to their design systems. Purportedly the Make Design tool was working fine up until these new components were added.

What Figma doesn’t share is where these new components came from. Did they involve design assets from Apple? Previously the company vehemently denied that claim.

Curiously, though, Figma is still not reactivating the Make Design feature…at least not yet.

If those late-added assets were the real source of the problem, it seems like the fix would be simple. But perhaps the company is just taking its time for a more thorough review and beta period than it went through at first.

Clearly, as this mishap has proven, that’s not a bad idea.