Our team recently attended Figma’s Config conference where they announced a slew of new features including a new UI, Figma Slides, Dev Mode updates, among others.

One feature that truly impressed was their new AI feature (currently only available in beta). Using Figma AI, anyone can use a simple text prompt to create professional UI design. Dylan Field, Figma’s CEO, gave a real-time demo of the feature. The results were quite good.

He was open about how early iterations of their model produced terrible results. It wasn’t until Figma began training their AI model on professionally created design systems did the results begin to improve.

He later announced that by default, Figma will automatically opt-in all users to have their designs subject to training for their AI (unless you’re on their Enterprise plan). You can opt out of this, but it’s likely that most users won’t know about this or take the time to opt out.

Early Results from Figma's AI

Shortly after opening the new Figma beta, results from the AI began circulating on social.

A shocking post showed an AI generated weather app that was nearly identical to Apple’s weather app. The labels, layout, and content was clearly “inspired” if not directly copied.

Shortly after these designs spread on social, Figma temporarily disabled their AI feature. Image credit to Andy Allen on X.

Figma’s AI & Intellectual Property Law

Figma’s AI model may replicate or generate designs that closely resemble the original work of other users, leading to unintentional sharing of proprietary or confidential design elements.

This begs the question—what are the legal implications around Figma’s AI model training (or potentially copying) their customer’s intellectual property, then reproducing a slight variation of that intellectual property for other users?

Unlike Midjourney, you own the copyright for the work Figma generates for you with AI. But say you create a moodboard that contains someone else’s professional, copyrighted work. You don’t own the right to this work, but if you haven’t opted out of Figma’s AI training feature, then Figma’s AI may train on this copyrighted material.

If a copyright dispute arises, responsibility is transferred to users.

If Figma is sued for using copyrighted work that you uploaded, you may be held liable.

In other words, opting into Figma’s AI training may open you up to significant legal risk.

Opting Out of Figma’s AI Training

We'll be disabling this for our company's Figma space and all of our client work. We recommend you do the same.

We'll post instructions on how to opt out once the feature has been reenabled.

Learn more about Figma's AI feature and their approach to building AI and usage data.