Figma is taking a new AI tool for application design offline for a while. The output generated by the tool looked a bit too similar to Apple’s designs.

The design app Figma introduced a new design and related AI features last week. One of these features has now been taken offline for a while. The tool Make designs was intended to make it easier for users to create visual designs for applications, but the tool’s designs turned out to be anything but original.

This was addressed publicly by Andy Allen, CEO of No boring softwarea company that develops mobile applications for iOS. In a “find the seven differences” game, he compared some designs for a weather application with those of Apple’s original weather app. After several attempts, the Figma tool continued to produce quasi-identical copies of Apple’s weather app.

Do you know Apple designs?

It has been suggested that Figma trained its AI tools on existing app designs, but CEO Dylan Field denies this. According to Field, the cause lies in the underlying design system of the “Make Designs” feature. Figma has now temporarily taken the feature offline again “until we are confident that we can support the output,” Field explains.

CTO Kevin Rasmussen can say with less certainty whether Make Designs was trained for Apple app designs or not. After all, the company did not train its AI models itself, he says in an interview with The Verge. Figma’s AI tools are based on GPT-4o from OpenAI and the Titan image generator from AWS.

Figma doesn’t completely reject responsibility either. “Betas aren’t perfect by definition. But we just didn’t notice this particular problem. And we should have,” Rasmussen said in an interview.

What Figma can say for sure is that it does not feed user work into AI models. With adjusted terms of service, it is opening the door to do so. Users have until August 15 to decide whether or not they want to give their permission for this. Figma wants to avoid the uproar that Adobe experienced with its terms of service.