Figma added OpenAI to a list of subprocessor companies | Hacker News Reader

Figma added OpenAI to a list of subprocessor companies

figma.com

38 pointslevmiseri10 comments

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Open technology always wins, and it's only a matter of time until Adobe-Figma fades out of relevance.

> Open technology always wins, and it's only a matter of time until Adobe-Figma fades out of relevance.

While I am a proponent of open source technology, I don't fully agree that closed source tools like Figma are destined to become irrelevant.

Figma gained popularity not simply because Sketch was closed source, but because it provided a better user experience and collaboration features that appealed to designers. Its editor runs in the browser, making it easily accessible, and the multiplayer editing capabilities make it easy for teams to work together.

So while being open source can be advantageous in terms of extensibility, transparency, and community-driven development, it is not the sole factor that determines a tool's success. Great user experience and product-market fit are the reasons Figma won over users, not strictly because it was proprietary software.

Not that I have anything against open technology (in fact I usually prefer it, with the caveat that I have a lot of respect for the quality of Figma and the talent of its founding team), but why should adding OpenAI as a subprocessor mark the death knell of Figma?

It's not like Figma is an accounting platform for analyzing your financial statements, or a log processor for querying sensitive PII. It's a tool for creating mock-ups of products that will eventually be public. The worst risk would be one of trade secret theft (e.g. a breach at OpenAI revealing mock-ups of an upcoming product), which is one that most companies already tolerate quite leniently. And of those most secretive companies that don't tolerate that risk, how many of them are using Figma now to begin with?

I suppose some companies may worry about implicitly providing their mock-ups to OpenAI for use in its training data. It would be nice if you could opt-out of this, and maybe you can. But the same arguments apply to this concern as do those to a general breach - if a company is worried about it then why use Figma in the first place? In fact as someone making mock-ups, I'd prefer that OpenAI train itself on my mock-ups, so that it gets better at making them for me.

Here is the email they sent for this, with some extra context:

"Earlier this year, we shared our view on AI at Figma [0] and the importance of being open with our community about our AI journey moving forward. Since then, we've been building practical, useful features for FigJam [1] and Figma, with more to come soon!

To power our new AI features, we're adding OpenAI, L.L.C. (“OpenAI”) as a subprocessor. Figma uses subprocessors, which are companies that process data on our behalf, to help provide our core Figma services to you.

What this means for you: We will only send the information you provide when using AI features. We also have an agreement that prohibits OpenAI from using any Figma customer data for training purposes.

If you would like to opt out of our AI-powered features, learn more here [2]."

[0]: https://www.figma.com/blog/ai-the-next-chapter-in-design/ [1]: https://www.figma.com/community/widget/1274481464484630971/j... [2]: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/17725942479127

To me, that reads more like Figma is using OpenAI for functionality (which inevitably means they have to provide information for prompting) more than it reads they are letting OpenAI use Figma data to make their products better.

Figma bought [Diagram](https://diagram.com) this year, so this is inevitable and unsurprising

If there's anything a chatbot is going to excel at, it's making Figmas, which in my experience and in the experience of everyone I know, is "lists."

Looks like Figma is selling via a backdoor.

No, OpenAI is listed as "Service provider for AI-enabled functionality" so they're just building new features in Figma powered by OpenAI.

yes probably, but that also doesn't necessary excludes the original posts comment

like there TOS is vague enough AFIK to allow a roundabout way of not selling but "giving away" a lot of your data if you do use such AI-enabled functionality, given how such functionality tends to be integrated this can easily be always

this is the problem with TOS and data protection, there are endless ways to formulate something so that it seems reasonable and sane but it actually is abusive BS, worse it's impossible to tell if a company used a formulation in a honest or dishonest way

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