Figma CEO explains why creative people shouldn’t worry about AI-generated design

• Figma CEO Dylan Field sees AI as a creative ally, not a threat, for graphic designers.
• Field encourages designers to push creative boundaries beyond AI’s “average” design capabilities.
• AI-generated graphic design means creative careers will become more generalist, he said.

That AI slop can’t hurt you, according to Figma’s top executive.

Figma CEO and cofounder Dylan Field said creative people — like the graphic designers who use his company’s tools — should find the AI era “a great time to be creative.”

AI models, he said, are trained on the “distribution of data” and typically create designs that people recognize as “average.”

Humans, on the other hand, can make something that hasn’t been seen before, Field told The New York Times’ “Hard Fork” podcast.

“If you’re in distribution, and you’re not actually pushing the bounds, I think that you’re in a worse shape than if you’re actually going and exploring the frontier of human knowledge, creativity, and what you can put out in the world,” Field said. “And making something that’s fundamentally new as an expression of yourself. So I get excited about that.”

Field made the remarks at a San Francisco event hosted by the podcast last week. A video of the interview was posted online on Friday.

Figma has released its own AI “vibe design” tools that allow users to mock up apps and other software. It’s faced competition from other tech companies, like Google, which has Stitch, and Anthropic, which has Claude Design.

Field said that the flood of AI-generated designs in marketing, in particular, should be pushing companies to make work that’s more original.

“In advertising now, we’re seeing ways to prove authenticity, to prove that you are actually making something that is not generated by AI, and some companies are really going for that,” Field said. “In the world of design, I think that what we’re going to see and what we are starting to see is a lot more interactivity, a lot more creativity, people really making software more of a creative medium.”

The CEO also waved away the notion that AI would create a job apocalypse for graphic designers. Jobs will become more generalist rather than specialized, he said.

“A lot of people that are doing other jobs, I think, will start calling themselves ‘designers-creatives,” Field said. “I think in general, we’re seeing more of this kind of generalist vibe that people are feeling like they have to embody.”