Figma Disables AI Feature After Accusations of Copying Apple’s Weather App

Figma has temporarily disabled its AI design feature, "Make Design," after accusations of copying Apple’s Weather app. Andy Allen of NotBoring Software highlighted the issue, prompting Figma CEO Dylan Field to deny claims of training the AI on specific app designs. However, Field acknowledged flaws in the QA process and promised to suspend the feature until it meets quality standards. The incident has implications for designers.

Risk classification

• Primary risk domain: 6 Socioeconomic & Environmental
• Primary risk subdomain: 6.3 Economic and cultural devaluation of human effort

The AI tool reproduced and imitated Apple's existing, publicly known creative UI design, devaluing human design effort and risking legal issues for users.

Additional risk subdomains

• 7.3 Lack of capability or robustness: The system lacked the capability to generate diverse designs due to low variability in its underlying design system, leading to repetitive and plagiarized outputs.

Causal factors

• Entity: AI
• Intent: Unintentional
• Timing: Post-deployment

The AI system unintentionally generated near-replicas of Apple's Weather app after being deployed to beta users.

EU AI Act risk tier

• Risk tier: 3 Limited Risk

Limited Risk: The system is a generative AI tool ('Make Designs') that generates UI layouts and components from text prompts, which falls under generative AI systems with transparency obligations.

AI system and alleged parties

• AI system: GPT-4o, Titan Image Generator G1 (Amazon, OpenAI)
• AI purpose: Image Generation
• Behaviour type: Assistant
• Alleged developer: Figma
• Alleged deployer: Figma
• Alleged harmed parties: Figma users, Designers and developers using Figma’s AI tool, Apple

Harm severity

Severity ratings are based on this scale.

Highest direct severity in any category: Negligible. Severity is scored from Negligible to Catastrophic in each harm category, for harm the reports describe as caused directly or indirectly by the AI system.

• Physical: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Infrastructure: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Property: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Financial: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Environmental: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Malicious content: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Differential treatment: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Civil rights: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Democracy: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Privacy: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Psychological: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Epistemic: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Child sexual exploitation and abuse: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible

People affected

• Occurrences reported: 1
• People reportedly exposed: 1

Potential causes

Management

• Rushed Deadline for Config: Management pushed the team hard to launch the tool at the annual conference.

Technology

• Low Output Variability: Off-the-shelf models combined with design system produced near-replicas.
• Reliance on Off-the-Shelf Models: Figma used GPT-4o and Titan instead of custom-trained models.

Data Inputs

• Flawed Bespoke Design System: The commissioned design system lacked sufficient variation in its components.
• Third-Party Model Training Data: Models used may have been trained on Apple's proprietary app designs.

Process and Methods

• Inadequate QA Process: Figma's quality assurance failed to catch similarities to existing apps.
• Rushed Beta Release: The feature was released in beta without thorough output verification.

Regulatory Environment

• IP Infringement Risks: Lack of standard compliance checks for AI-generated design copyright.

Information quality

• Classification confidence: High
• Reason for confidence: The reports provide clear, consistent accounts of the incident from both the person who discovered the issue (Andy Allen) and Figma's leadership (CEO Dylan Field and CTO Kris Rasmussen). The technical cause (low variability in the commissioned design system used by off-the-shelf models) and the company's response (disabling the feature for QA) are explicitly detailed.
• Ambiguities identified: Whether the underlying models (GPT-4o or Titan) were trained on Apple's designs remains unconfirmed, though Figma denies training its own tools on them.
• Alternative interpretations: The replication could be interpreted as direct training data plagiarism by the third-party models rather than an issue with Figma's commissioned design system.

Figma temporarily disabled its 'Make Design' AI feature after it generated near-replicas of Apple's Weather app. The incident stems from an unintentional quality assurance failure regarding the diversity of the underlying design systems. It represents a standard commercial intellectual property and product quality issue with negligible national security implications.

• Overall national security impact: Negligible
• Scope: Single nation
• Primary target: No clear primary
• Alleged perpetrator: Unknown

Threat characteristics

• Imminence: Long-term. The feature has already been disabled, presenting no immediate or near-term national security crisis.
• Autonomy: Human-controlled. The AI tool acts as an assistant to help designers create UI layouts, requiring human input and final decisions.
• Novelty: Established threat. Generative AI producing outputs that closely mimic training data or existing proprietary designs is a well-known and established issue.

Impact by dimension

• Physical security: Negligible. The incident involves a UI design tool and has no impact on physical systems, infrastructure, or human safety.
• Information security: Negligible. No intelligence compromise, classified data exposure, or information warfare operations were involved in this incident.
• Sovereignty: Negligible. The incident does not affect state authority, electoral systems, or core government operations.
• Economic security: Negligible. While involving intellectual property replication of a major tech company, it represents a standard commercial QA issue with negligible impact on national economic or technological security.
• Societal stability: Negligible. There are no implications for societal stability, civil liberties, or human rights.