AI Image Generators Are Insane in 2026 — But There's One Big Problem

It's 2026 and AI is just insane.

I mean, genuinely insane. If you told me three years ago that tools like Ideogram, NanoBanana, and the latest batch of AI image generators would be churning out UI designs that look better than what most human designers produce, I would have laughed. But here we are.

Open up any of these tools, type something like "modern SaaS dashboard with dark theme, analytics charts, sidebar navigation" and within seconds you get a pixel-perfect mockup that looks like it came from a senior designer's portfolio. The quality is unreal. Gradients, shadows, typography, spacing — all of it, spot on.

Designers are using AI graphic design tools to brainstorm landing pages, explore mobile app layouts, prototype dashboards, and generate UI concepts faster than ever before. The AI design tool landscape in 2026 is leaps ahead of where it was even a year ago.

Beautiful Images, Zero Editability

But here's the thing nobody wants to talk about.

All of these outputs? They're just flat images. PNGs. JPEGs. That's it.

You can't click on a button and move it. You can't select the heading text and change the font. You can't swap out an icon or adjust the padding between elements. You can't hand this image to a developer and say "build this" — because it's just a picture. There's no code, no layers, no structure. Nothing.

And that's the fundamental gap. AI image generators crossed the quality threshold for UI design. They can now generate screenshots that are indistinguishable from real products. But they output flat images with no editability and no path to production. You can't build a responsive website from a PNG.

Think about what that means for a real workflow. You generate a gorgeous UI concept with AI. Love it. Now what? You open Figma and spend two hours manually recreating every element from scratch — matching fonts, colors, spacing, icon placement. All by hand. You're essentially tracing an image, which is exactly what designers did before AI. The irony is painful.

What's missing is a way to convert that image to an editable design. A proper UI screenshot converter that turns pixels into layers you can actually work with.

From AI Research to Product: Why We Built img2figma

We're a small team of AI PhD researchers. Our backgrounds span computer vision, generative models, and code generation. For years we worked on these problems in the abstract — publishing papers, running experiments, pushing benchmarks.

But at some point we looked at this gap between "AI can generate a beautiful UI" and "nobody can actually use it" and thought: we can fix this. The pieces are all there. Object detection to understand the structure. Image generation to clean up the output. Code generation to write the design file. Someone just needs to put them together.

So we built img2figma — an image to Figma converter that takes any image and turns it into editable Figma designs. You upload a screenshot, an AI-generated UI, a mockup, whatever — and you get back real Figma layers. Text you can edit. Buttons you can move. Backgrounds you can swap. Everything, fully editable.

It works as a native Figma plugin. No exports, no imports, no converting files between formats. You stay inside Figma the entire time.

How img2figma Converts Any Image to Editable Figma Layers

Here's a high-level look at what happens under the hood. We use a three-stage pipeline that combines different AI capabilities:

The whole process takes under a minute. Upload an image, wait briefly, and your Figma canvas populates with clean, structured, editable layers. No tracing. No manual recreation. Just AI-powered Figma plugin magic.

The Prompt-to-Design-to-Code Workflow

Here's what the actual workflow looks like in practice. This is what we think of as vibe coding for designers:

1. Prompt an AI image generator to create your UI concept. Describe what you want, get a stunning visual.
2. Convert image to Figma with img2figma. Upload the generated image into the plugin and get back editable layers.
3. Edit and refine in Figma. Adjust text, swap colors, move elements, tweak the layout. It's all native Figma components now.
4. Hand off or export. Ship the design to developers, export assets, or use a Figma-to-code tool for the final step.

The entire cycle from idea to editable design takes minutes instead of hours. That's the promise of combining AI graphic design with an AI figma plugin that actually makes the output usable. Vibe graphic design at its finest — you describe the vibe, AI generates the visual, and img2figma makes it real.

This workflow works just as well for converting screenshots to Figma designs. Found a competitor's UI you love? Screenshot it, upload to img2figma, and you have an editable Figma file to learn from and iterate on. It's a proper screenshot to Figma converter that turns any reference into a starting point.

Where This Is Going

We believe the gap between "generating visuals" and "editing designs" is one of the most important problems in AI design tooling right now. The tools that generate images are incredible. But without a bridge to editability, they're limited to inspiration boards and mockup previews.

img2figma is that bridge. And we're just getting started. The multimodal AI design space is moving fast — better detectors, better inpainters, smarter code generators. Every improvement in the underlying AI makes our conversion better. We're building toward a future where the gap between visual idea and production design is zero.