But in an age when AI has the potential to make most things look at least relatively good, Levy asked, how can companies using Figma hope to stand out? Field says the answer isn’t just lowering the floor to meet novice designers and coders, something that kind of AI work has already done, but “raising the ceiling” to help pretty good designers and coders work beyond the previous limits of their skill sets.

The best designers, Field says, have a unique ability to manipulate interactivity, dynamism, motion, and UX to create work that few others can meet. With AI tools like the ones Figma has or will integrate, he hopes that more people will be “limited more by their ideas than the tools in front of them,” ideally giving them the chance to match the work of some of the best designers in the world.

While Field acknowledged the possibility that good design can help bad actors, citing a particularly well-designed magazine that ISIS put out around 2014 or 2015 as an extreme use case, he says all tools have the power to lift people up if they’re made correctly.

“Most of the AI tools right now are about lowering the floor,” Field reiterated. “They’re about making it so there’s democratization, and that’s great in many ways, like you talk to people that do image generation with diffusion models and some of them are doing art therapy, which was never possible before.” Still, he added, it’s important to raise the ceiling. “That’s where a lot of our thinking is right now,” he said, “and that’s where I hope we can drive towards.”