Emanuel Maiberg (tweet, Hacker News):
The design tool Figma has disabled a newly launched AI-powered app design tool after a user showed that it was clearly copying Apple’s weather app.
Figma disabled the feature, named Make Design, after CEO and cofounder of Not Boring Software Andy Allen tweeted images showing that asking it to make a “weather app” produced several variations of apps that looked almost identical to Apple’s default weather app.
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.
It can’t modify components in any way other than changing texts, images and style. They only made the model fill the contents for existing pre-defined components.
This is even more disgraceful than a human rip-off. Figma knows what they trained this thing on, and they know what it outputs.
It just blows my mind how much companies keep self-owning because they think they risk anything being ‘too slow’ in adopting AI. All the fast AI implementations have been bad. Google answers. MS Recall. This Figma AI thing.
Take your time to do it right the first time.
No company, in their right mind, would ever let their employees unknowingly design proprietary ideas in @figma and send those to a server for others to recreate. […] I’ve heard mixed but I believe it’s by default opt in for free users and by default opt out for enterprises.
It is consistent to view this clear duplication of existing works through the same lens of morality as when A.I. tools duplicate articles and specific artists. I have not seen a good explanation for why any of these should be viewed differently from the others. There are compelling reasons for why it is okay to copy the works of others, just as there are similarly great arguments for why it is not.
In other words, we’re concerned that, this time, technology won’t open up new opportunities for creative people on the web. We fear that it’ll destroy them.
We want to do something about this. And we’re starting with an open letter, embedded below, that we’re sending on behalf of MacStories, Inc. to U.S. Senators who have sponsored AI legislation as well as Italian members of the E.U.
Sebastiaan de With (Mastodon):
Some career designers were ambiguous about the impact on careers, but many went as far as to assert that designers had nothing to fear: AI, after all, could never replace your job. Unless you were terrible at it.
The problem with that, however, is that in our creative fields by definition, we are all terrible at our work at some point.
The way anyone has achieved success is through a slog. A long, steady swim upstream in a relentless and never-ending yet plentiful river of unpaid or cheap small jobs. I would wager the vast majority of design done every day are exactly these jobs.
Previously:
Artificial Intelligence Copyright Design Figma Weather.app Web