Figma’s AI Will Read Your Files and Learn Your Job

Remember a few weeks ago people were on fire about Adobe announcing they would access all of your files to train their AI??

Even if you love AI, this causes immediate problems. Nearly all of us are doing confidential work. We signed NDAs that we won’t share that work outside the org or a particular team. We wouldn’t want our files to be read by anybody else, neither a human nor a machine. And if this file becomes a source for training, we could be in trouble for making our confidential work an AI training source.

Scrubbing or redacting might not help since the AI has to see the file to determine whether something should be redacted or excluded. And we have to trust that that will work flawlessly and never make a mistake. Cough cough.

Figma says hold my?beer.

I woke up to an email from Figma that started like this:

For accessibility, let’s paste most of the email here, though you probably got the same email. I’ll discuss what this means after this long quote:?

We recently announced a beta for AI features in Figma Design. In this email, we are sharing our approach to building AI features and what’s next. ? ?To improve these features, we plan to start training AI models to understand design concepts, patterns, file structure, and tooling in Figma. Learn more about how your team can manage AI and our other updates below.

Managing AI settings

Team admins can control how their teams use AI with two new settings for each team they manage:

* Whether your team can use AI features (on by default for Starter and Professional teams).

* Whether content is shared for AI training (on by default for Starter and Professional teams).

AI features and content training are optional. Teams can use AI features, even if content training is turned off. Read how to access your AI settings here.

The content training setting goes into effect on August 15th, 2024. If an admin turns off content training after that, new content and edits will not be used to train AI models.

New AI terms in our policies

The key updates to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy do the following:

* Allow Figma to use your team’s content to improve AI features, when content training is set to ‘on’

* Clarify that you retain your rights to content inputted into Figma AI and to the results generated

These new terms will go into effect on August 15, 2024. By continuing to use Figma, including keeping your files with us, you agree to these terms.

OK but are they really going to see all of my confidential work?

We take additional steps to train our models so that they learn general design patterns and Figma-specific concepts and tools?—?not your content, concepts, and ideas. For example, we de-identify content and redact sensitive information including from text and images.

Yes, it will see your confidential work, make some sort of judgment about what information is sensitive, and supposedly de-identify or redact that.?

And if your design is something really innovative and groundbreaking? Figma might still train AI on it and how you created it. You can’t really redact the concept, can you? Figma would “know” this private and confidential idea, feature, product, or innovation.?

It might de-identify a logo, face, name, or something it knows how to recognize. But it’s unlikely to remove an innovative idea. How would it know??

In 2023, we did research, business design, and roadmapping for a startup. Can you imagine if our tool watched everything we did, the order in which we did it, and saw all of that data with the intent to use it or learn from it? Can you imagine if that data were added to training models, and what we did was suggested to other people trying to do something similar? Can you imagine our client suing us to the ends of the earth?

Figma wants your work to teach it how it can do your?job.

I didn’t watch Figma’s 2024 conference, but I heard from plenty of people who did. It sounds like the main messages were that non-Designers and people from outside of UX can do design work themselves. Just have a design system, use Figma, and use the AI.

That message makes sense if you are building an AI that replicates the actions—and hypothetically the process and thinking—of a Designer. Figma will watch you making Figma files and somehow become great at information architecture, interaction design, designing for human behavior, accessibility, etc. The AI will somehow reverse engineer how Designers found and solved problems through design.

It’s no longer “who” will take a Designer’s job. It’s “what,” and the answer is, “An AI that your favorite design tool created to watch what you do and how you do it so that it can be you.” And Figma wants Product Managers, not Designers, to do this work, or so the presentations at the 2024 conference say.

Then we won’t need Product Managers either, will we? We just need someone to tell Figma what to do. Could be an Engineer. Maybe we’ll just keep Engineers so they can have AI do the design, and then they code, with or without AI’s help.

Things to?notice:

1. You’re opted in by default. You will have to go into settings and opt out.
2. Where it claimed the opt-out settings didn’t appear in my free account. I will now have to contact support. (Update: found it, turned AI off)
3. I believe that this will be a Renaissance for other design tools. Axure is still my fave, especially since you can prototype with realistic interactivity. If you want design done well, you will want a knowledgeable and specialized human involved. And you will want to test it using a realistic model that functions how the product would function.?

Figma doesn’t want to be that tool. It doesn’t matter if nearly all usability testing in Figma is flawed because you’re testing something that doesn’t really work. Figma wants to replace Designers with AI, and probably doesn’t plan to become a better prototyping tool.

But this assumes that companies will see the value in great design work being done by great designers. If we’re OK with mediocre or poor design work, then sure, AI can do it.?

What’s being sold to you as augmenting your work will replace your work… and?you.

Isn’t that what it’s designed for? Statements like these might have sounded tin foil hat and wacky just 5 years ago, say around 2019. Now, as we watch how fast AI is evolving, it does seem possible that AI will replace many of us.

Sure, it won’t do the work really well for some time, maybe even years. But it’s already trying to do some of your work now. People are already augmenting or replacing some of their work tasks with these tools. A next step could be that we don’t need the people to run the tools. The tools watched the patterns of how they were used, and the tools run themselves now.

“But we need to be adaptable and?evolve.”

Sure, but when we don’t stand up, speak out, or push back, the steamroller keeps coming for us. By the time you will try to fight for your job to still exist, everybody will have learned not to listen to you or that you can be manipulated into agreeing. You will have been gaslit out of job. Hey, at least you were adaptable and said lots of yes, right?

Remember when we thought a stable future job would be Prompt Engineer?

And everybody rushed out courses on how to be a Prompt Engineer. But UX always says the best interface is no interface, something natural that just works the way you want it to work.?

As AI improves, if humans are using it, they will just be able to ask for what they want without special “prompt engineering” skills. I didn’t study prompt engineering, and I have no trouble getting interesting things from Claude.

Is your design tool a tool or pretending to be the Designer?

This is the question going forward. I want my tool to just be my tool. I hope Axure doesn't follow in the unfortunate footsteps of Adobe and Figma. I hope companies will use this opportunity to differentiate themselves.

I wonder about who in our company will be strategists, problem finders, and problem solvers. Or will we just ask AI to figure all of that out??

I also wonder about all of the poor design work that surely lives in Figma. Will Figma train off files from newbies? Will Figma see famous company names and hungrily grab as much of that work as possible? Unfortunately, some design work, even at big and famous companies, is poor work.

Will Figma’s AI be a good Designer? A great Designer? A shitty Designer? Will it create valuable and accessible experiences? Will Figma’s AI be able to tell a good Designer from a bad one, and train AI to do what good Designers do and avoid what bad Designers do?

When I think about how my brain works, can AI be the problem-finder and problem-solver I am? Can it apply my talents and skills to design work? I don’t think so, but when it can, we have many other questions few are talking about.

Where does the slippery slope end? What’s the?endgame?

Figma becomes some sort of UX Designer based on watching you work and understanding your files. Let’s say this mostly ends Designer jobs since companies would rather pay less for mediocrity than pay humans for good work.

Every other tool can now train AI to do the work humans were doing. We’ll pass the work to someone without expertise in that domain because someone needs to babysit the AI… for now. And for some reason, we want the AI babysat by someone who’s not an expert in this area.

Let’s imagine that there will soon be a pile of jobs we no longer need because AI will start training on how those specialists do their work. Then what??

• First, B2B companies start losing business since they can’t sell licenses to humans. AI doesn’t need their tools. Who needs JIRA or Monday.com or insert giant list of B2B tools that help humans organize and do their work?
• Then, B2C companies will start losing business. So many people will be out of work that people won’t need what you sell or won’t be able to afford it.

What’s the endgame? I don’t get it. Computers building things for computers? And we’re all farmers just to survive? I don’t get it, and I don’t know why everybody wants to rush into every dystopian movie plot.

The writing is sadly on the wall.

As Melanie Levy pointed out in our online community, Figma is the snake eating its tail.

Let’s say Figma is successful, and their AI can do some sort of design work. Let’s say companies love the cost and time savings, and start cutting Designers. They leave just a few Designers to babysit Figma (let’s pretend that PMs don’t get to babysit the design… actual Designers will).

Figma now loses lots of licenses from that company. Perhaps they had 20, 40, or more licenses for all those Designers and PMs working on this. Now, let’s say it’s a remaining crew of 2 or 3 Designers. Figma loses a lot of money fast. Congrats on being fast!

It’s one of the near-endgame situations that companies may have to deal with. What typically happens is that a company losing that many licenses might raise prices to try to make the revenue up. But if your nearish future includes a fast or slow exodus from your ecosystem, a price rise might make people jump sooner.

It’ll be an interesting business problem.

Update: I’m seeing suggestions that people poison the training.

I saw the idea of turning AI training off on all of your work accounts and important stuff. But turn AI training ON on some free side account where you make really awful stuff.

What will the AI train on when most, if not all, professional Designers turn the AI training off?

Another interesting business problem.

Will Figma then go the route of other companies and change their terms to say that by using Figma at all, they have access to your files, and they will train AI on your work? We’ll see.

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