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If You Can't BEAT Apple...
Figma pulls its generative AI tool... YouTube will take down deepfakes... and Meta kills the "Made with AI" tag
If You Can't BEAT Apple...
Figma pulls its generative AI tool... YouTube will take down deepfakes... and Meta kills the "Made with AI" tag
by Tod Maffin (email • LinkedIn • social media)
Today's News
Figma Disables AI Design Tool After Copying Apple
If you or your colleagues opened up the design tool Figma this morning to get to work, you may have noticed one big piece missing: Its new much-ballyhooed generative AI tool has been cut from the app.
It’s a temporary cut, and for a little bit of an embarrassing reason: It was found to be copying Apple’s weather app almost to the pixel.
If you can’t beat ‘em…
One designer asked Figma for mockups for a generic mobile weather app, then asked for another, then another — and each time, Figma would just reproduce essentially the Apple app: widgets in the same position, data in the same order, graphical presentation almost identical.
Figma’s CEO acknowledged the problem, saying he’d been pushing the team too hard to meet a conference deadline. He said the AI feature would be temporarily disabled until it could produce reliable outputs.
How did it get in there?
As for how Apple’s weather app got lifted in training, that’s a little more murky.
Figma uses multiple vendors for its AI models, including OpenAI, Amazon Titan, and Jasper. These vendors do not disclose their training data.
Legal consequences unlikely
In theory, an app maker can sue another app maker for copyright infringement, especially if it has patented certain elements of the app, but copycat apps are incredibly common on the Apple and Google app stores.
The problem is so bad that in 2021 an app developer sued Apple for negligence around copycat apps on the App Store.
Most copycat apps are not popular enough to rise to the level of getting legal scrutiny, but an app maker accidentally copying another app this closely because they used a generative AI tool is certainly not a good look.
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Sites Hit by September SERP Update Sneak Up
Sites hit by Google's Helpful Content Update which rolled out last September are seeing small improvements in their search ranking position over the past week.
Small — nothing like full recoveries, though some people remain hopeful.
Barry Schwartz at SERoundtable says:
We are all hopeful we will see significant recoveries for some of those sites with the next core update.
This noted uplift came from a small study of 384 sites which had been heavily impacted. They’re still lower than before the September update, but they have been sneaking up, on average.
Then again, there was a small algorithm update to Google’s search engine over the weekend, so it’s possible that played a role as well.
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