Just last week, Figma introduced its suite of AI tools in a bid to make it easier for designers on their design journey. But the need to jump on the AI bandwagon has landed them in a bit of a pickle. As it turns out, the AI design tool in Figma, the one that can churn out designs with a text prompt, is already on the retreat. Figma has disabled the AI design tool currently, and there's no knowing when it will make it back. Here's the full story.

Figma released a few generative AI features, in beta, that included tools like prototyping using AI and AI-powered design generation. The latter, the one under fire, was meant to make it easier to get started with designing. The AI tool can help you create mock-ups of apps, like UI layouts and other components, using text and image prompts which you can further edit. Well, it does create mock-ups for text prompts, no two ways about it.

Then, where did the trouble start? The mock-ups it did create were direct rip-offs of Apple's Weather app.

Spotted and shared by Andy Allen on X, CEO of Not Boring Software, his posts show the results of the multiple weather apps mocked up by the Figma AI tools for his prompts, next to the screenshot of the Weather app from iPhone. And each attempt produces a result similar to the original Weather app on iOS.

The incident has raised severe questions about the apps that Figma AI was trained on. It also raised the bigger question of how effective using generative AI ultimately would be, as people are saying that it would ultimately result in all similar kind of looking apps (like it happened with AI writing).

Following this debacle, the design tool has been temporarily disabled for now. And that's a good thing; no designer would unknowingly want to plagiarise the UI from another app that could land them in legal troubles.

Dylan Field, CEO of Figma, also took to X to share this update, while taking the entire blame for pushing his team to hit the deadline and not insisting for a better QA process before the release.

He also stated that they have done no AI training of their own for Figma AI tools as of yet (they were planning to start it August 15th, while giving the users a clear option to opt out). Figma essentially used off-the-shelf LLM models and a design system for the Figma AI and the problem seems to be with the design system.

Whatever the problem, the feature has been disabled for now and won't be re-enabled until the company is sure that it can stand behind its outputs – in other words, there are no more such disasters. So, as of now, there's no knowing when the feature will pass the QA Figma plans to perform (that should not have been overlooked in the first place) and hit the app again.