Figma Disables AI App Design Tool After It Copied Apple's Weather App

From Gleb Sabirzyanov

> So there is no “training” in the components part at all. It uses pre-defined components that Figma team designed. They made complete apps with designs based on existing apps: weather, fitness, etc. If you ask the AI to create a weather app, it would use the weather app components

https://x.com/gleb_sexy/status/1807757536306594270

https://x.com/gleb_sexy/status/1807757591696543923

I'm confused why they'd take it down. I mean, isn't this what AI is supposed to do? Or is the bad thing that someone pointed it out?

A skeptic in me says who cares, this is just making it easier to do what app developers are already doing. The amount of copycat apps in every app store is pretty ridiculous.

The idealist version of me thinks how incredibly sad that a major tool provider thinks this is the future of design tools.

Didn't they train the initial version of this AI app on the design system that Apple made exclusively for Figma? If so, can't it be argued that the AI is just doing its job based on the limited learning set it's been trained with?

The designs produced by the tool are indistinguishable from what you’d get if you told a designer you wanted the Apple weather app with slightly different colors and font sizes: https://x.com/asallen/status/1807675146020454808

“Within hours of seeing this tweet, we identified the issue, which was related to the underlying design systems that were created. Ultimately it is my fault for not insisting on a better QA process for this work and pushing our team hard to hit a deadline for Config,” Figma CEO Dylan Field said on Twitter.

Classic.

My worry is that going down the rabbit hole of what is plagiarism and copyright is not productive. Humans are inherently rip off engines by this definition: everything we create is some remixed version of acquired knowledge created by someone else. Where do you draw the line? How much novelty must there be? Can you police this remixing at scale?

Tough questions when a machine can create novels in seconds that are as good as human written novels over many years. Value of knowledge is about to plummet.

This seems to be happening a lot with these things. "Here's an amazing new thing... oops, sorry, actually, it's terrible, let us remove that." This, the bonkers Microsoft screenshot-everything feature, various Google things...

With AI apps -

If you ARE paying for it, you ARE the customer AND you ARE the product being sold.

That's exactly how it is done in code too, but visual designs are easier to detect and cross-reference.

Another proof that AGI will never work, just used for marketing and fund-grabbing purposes.

Does Figma understand their users are designers?

E: Reminded of an anecdote from when I studied biomedical engineering. The professor told us about an endoscope system that worked better than the industry standard. The company was so excited about this that they went to a medical conference and told a room of doctors that it was so easy, a nurse could do it. The company went out of business.

This can be said about every AI system/software and not just Figma. First the data is gathered for "self-supervised" training. Then, some product is built on top of it to gather users. Once the users show up their data is in turn used to fine tune the system in order to continue gathering data and subscriptions from the users.

The logic of AI companies is very simple and the entire value proposition is in how efficiently the company can convert user data/feedback into features that users will pay for so that the AI company can continue paying their cloud bills.

here’s the tweet:

https://x.com/asallen/status/1807675146020454808

A blog post of a tweet that doesn't include the image so you have to click the tweet link to see the comparison. The tweet should have been linked and not the pointless blog post.

I had an interesting thought: if coding AI gets good enough will it eventually be possible to pirate SaaS?

Probably not extremely complex deep SaaS but about 80% of it is just a UI in front of a database and some associated services more or less. A very good coding AI could probably clone the UI and the database at least by setting a bot loose on the system to learn.

Not sure you’d even call it piracy except maybe in spirit. I suppose their ToS could forbid it.

A generative AI thing ripping stuff off? WELL I NEVER, HOW SHOCKING.

Like, it would be surprising if it did _not_ do stuff like this.

At least the AI got the lozenges to match up properly. Apple can't seem to get that right (on my phone).

"Technofeudalism" sounds more and more prescient, GenAI like what we are seeing adds more fuel to the argument that we are working, for free, for the tech behemoths vacuuming data.

It's strange to think a book just released last year already needs an update, where Yanis Varoufakis only considered us working for free in these technofeuds by providing behavioural data (what do we click, what do we buy, etc.) the GenAI bullshit now has upped it a notch to include all creative work done as free work for tech companies.

It's sad to think that only cases like Figma, where they step on the toes of other giants with deep pockets, might actually bring some change to regulations on companies profiting from the work of others without compensation.

I believe there could be a whole lot more useful things in AI to be done for the amount of resources being spent on training GenAI. It's a neat tool being completely misguided to create neat party tricks...

I've been using LLMs a lot to guide me into studying topics I know very little about and Google searches lead me into spam-filled garbage, I love to use them for this task, and hope to see many improvements on this direction. There's so much more useful stuff to explore instead of spitting transformed copies of the ingested training data.

Shit like this [0] boils my blood, the absolute hubris.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/p0rcl-wo-qM

Related:

Figma AI is a rip-off engine

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40855461

Related:

Figma AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40802423

I thought copying other people's work was the whole point.

Taking shot at Samsung as if Apple is 100% original in their designs Dude is a certified Apple sheep

Now that the Adobe merger is off, we're hearing from investors and partners that an exit is desired. Generative AI is the way the company does this, by transforming the company into a lean, mean shareholder-value-driving-machine.

What a nothing-burger, Figma says they didn't do any custom training or fine tuning and they think the look a like problem is due to a design system they commissioned. They don't explicitly say the design system was created by a human but odds are... Also, the thing that was "ripped off" is the weather app. Oh, you mean the app that looks nearly identical on every platform and website ever? Wow, I'm shocked.

Aaaaand it's gone.

Well, it seems to look at UI, and not at functionality. While Apple's one is beautiful it has only gone backwards in functionality and quality, both on iOS and Apple Watch.

For example, below the Daily Forcase you have these blocks which can be 1x1 or 2x1 or 2x2 sizedd. Problem is that sometimes some of them aren't there, depending on the location you're looking at. While a whole line disappearing is fine, a 1x1 disappearcing causes the one on the right of it to jump to the left, which makes it super hard to find.

On Apple Watch they switch to this circular UI, where the current hour is highlighted, and then going around it shows the temperature. Except it's now limited to 12 hours. I wake up at 6AM (Phoenix), and I would like to see the forecast for tonight 8PM to see if we're going to be able to cook steaks on the BBQ. No can do.

Not to mention that I need to look at the screen and check where the current hour is (I'm no longer adept at looking at an analog clock, I don't have them in my life anymore).

Lastly, Apple Weather offline is horrible. On iOS it shows nothing. Is it that bad to show outdated weather?

Or, you look at your watch, and the shortcut shows X, you tap it to open the weather app. Weather app shows shows Y, count to 10 and it shows Z...

I miss Dark Sky. That one could tell me that my neighbor was getting .1" of rain and I was getting .2". It was precise. It worked. I don't know why Apple bought them.

Sorry, rant.

Penny Arcade[1] had a rant about this very subject this morning:

> The big players in this space all happen believe things about other people's intellectual property that are orthogonal to human flourishing. It appears to be endemic in their spaces. Other times, we don't have to work so hard. For example: Perplexity literally duplicates other people's work on its own site. Then, it will generate a podcast based on the uncredited work. They want the same thing as Google's Gemini, in that you'll come to it for a search experience that's owned end to end - powered by your own uncredited work.

Gen AI models have also been used to appropriate an artist's distinctive art style[2] in a way that pushes up against the edge of copyright. You've all heard about OpenAI and Scarlett Johansson[3]. This kind of stuff makes the industry look shady.

In theory existing copyright law should cover these new AI cases, but if you use something like Figma AI and it "rips off" (as John puts it) an existing app, you might not even realize that you're copying someone else's design because there's no provenance. That makes it harder to follow the law.

[1]: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2024/07/01/jobophage

[2]: https://waxy.org/2022/11/invasive-diffusion-how-one-unwillin...

[3]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01578-4

This is embarrassing and should be a lesson to other companies looking to "dump" AI into their products.

The “not boring weather app” video is actually really impressive