Figma Retrospective on the "Make Designs" Feature | Hacker News Reader

Figma Retrospective on the "Make Designs" Feature

figma.com

29 pointsotterwise9 comments

It was fine when it was smaller illustrators having there work copied by AI why has Figma had to rush out this change because it's Apple? This is what this AI is supposed to do get you close to a framework design quickly if your app is popular this is going to happen.

Good point. And even if the Apple case was a "samples" issue, I think it's unrealistic to expect it to avoid ever producing a design that resembles any prior work.

> But in the week leading up to Config, new components and example screens were added that we simply didn’t vet carefully enough. A few of those assets were similar to aspects of real world applications, and appeared in the output of the feature with certain prompts.

I assumed the AI was mimicking designs that it had been trained on, but this is saying they gave the AI a design system to work with. Their designers created a design system that was presumably templates for the AI to use. The design system they gave it was the source of the copycat components.

So they put Apple’s weather app components into the design system. Then when you prompt it for a weather app, it picked those back out of the design system.

This makes the problem even worse in some ways. This outcome was not only predictable, it was intentional (by at least some portion of the team).

I'm curious what number of design systems were included, if they were all first party generated, and to your point, let's see the offending template.

Seems this is less of an "AI" issue, more like if Squarespace offered a template that was identical to Apple.com.

Figma keeps getting worse and worse (rugpulling useful features like inspect mode to charge more for them, deleting free drafts, deleting editors off free plans, rushed bad features like fake AI, features no one cares about like slides that will probably be excuses to gut existing features to charge more, not finishing existing fragmented paywalled features like variants which suck because free users cant access them, etc. Figma is hot garbage. Im trying out penpot and creatie right now and both are fine replacements. Sentiment with other designers is similar, Figma sucks now, get out before they pull you down with them.

I used to love Figma, but ever since the – now failed – attempt at being acquired by Adobe, they've been aggressively doubling down on anti-user, Adobe-like practices. It's like they failed to be acquired and somehow decided to just pick the Adobe philosophy anyway. I assume part of this is due to the current context; funding with free money must be harder than before, even though it seems they're in the middle of a new round right now[1].

I can't blame them for squeezing their customers as much as possible; they're the superior product, after all.

[1] https://siliconangle.com/2024/07/17/figma-confirms-undisclos...

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become Adobe.

FigJam is also something in its own right. Try creating a sequence diagram there. Arrows just randomly have their own behavior of sticking somewhere where they shouldn’t or sometimes just not. You just keep copy-pasting that one arrow that doesn’t misbehave but still you end up with a horribly misaligned diagram.

This sounds like a marketing post for this feature to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com