Scorsese Signs on with an AI Startup

On Tuesday, Scorsese announced he had signed on as a partner and advisor to Black Forest Labs, a German generative AI startup behind the FLUX family of image-generation models. Black Forest Labs released a video in which Scorsese and FLUX do a working session to show how AI can improve movie storyboarding by efficiently visualizing his concepts for movie scenes in real time.

Scorsese also discusses how AI could have helped him create a famous Steadicam shot from his 1991 movie GoodFellas far faster, saving production time and sparing the crew, had the technology been available at the time.

Perhaps had this announcement been made many years ago, it might have been received with a measure of curiosity, as his use of 3D for the movie Hugo did in 2011.

But the announcement with Black Forest Labs landed in a conversation about AI that has been running hot. Many in the entertainment industry view AI as a threat to an already fragile industry. Concerns over creative authenticity, digital likeness rights and job displacement were central to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, resulting in new contractual guidelines regarding how and when AI can be used in union productions.

Since then, controversies like the unveiling of AI-generated actor Tiffany Norwood and the casting of an AI recreation of Val Kilmer in As Deep as the Grave have not exactly assuaged those concerns.

Hollywood Is At War With Itself

AI’s detractors have pulled no punches, either. For example, Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old director whose A24 debut Backrooms has become a sensation, described generative AI as having “genuinely harmful consequences already happening“ and called it “less like innovation than a symptom of a broader cultural and economic rot.” Guillermo del Toro, more bluntly, said he’d rather die than use AI.

But not everyone in Hollywood is anti-AI. At the Cannes Film Festival in May, Demi Moore urged Hollywood to embrace AI. “AI is here,” she said. “And so to fight it is to fight something that is a battle that we will lose.” Reese Witherspoon, in a viral Instagram post, urged her 30 million followers to learn about AI and use it. Steven Soderberg is already using AI in filmmaking, and Peter Jackson has described it as “a tool like any other.”

Artists Push Back At Martin Scorsese

Scorsese’s announcement was followed with detractors. Boots Riley, whose film I Love Boosters is currently in theaters, pushed back sharply, posting his own rough hand-drawn storyboards on social media to make the point that human sketches are sufficient for the initial planning process before human artists improve the initial drafts. Animation director Samuel Deats wrote, “ …there is absolutely no reason to need AI built on the stolen work of millions of artists to storyboard your vision, have some damn pride and respect your peers.”

Those reactions require some context to appreciate. Storyboard artists do more than execute someone else’s vision. Sylvain Despretz, who spent years working with Ridley Scott on films including Gladiator, described the work as a form of screenwriting, noting, “The storyboards are as good as the director.”

The Coen Brothers have used the same storyboard artist, J. Todd Anderson, since Raising Arizona. Anderson has described storyboarding as a human collaboration: “I go inside their heads, try to understand what they are thinking, and put it on paper.” This is a process built on trust that no prompt replicates.

In addition, the pushback is about how AI is already threatening the livelihood of visual artists in the entertainment industry, and the number of Hollywood jobs deemed “safe from AI” seems to be getting smaller.

Scorsese Says He’s Making Demos, Not Taking Jobs

Scorsese is focusing on the creation of the rough demo that expresses his initial thinking before accomplished artists get involved.

In a statement, he wrote, “I’m interested in the intersection of technology and storytelling, and seeing how that can push the bounds of creativity to create deeper and richer experiences for audiences. Remember, cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve.”

But his detractors warn that the gap between “AI helps a director explore a scene in preproduction” and “AI replaces the concept artists, storyboard artists, and visual development illustrators who do this work professionally” is smaller than it sounds.

Studios don’t need a director’s blessing to make that leap; his endorsement, though, creates a precedent. When a below-the-line artist loses a job to FLUX, the defense writes itself, similar to how AI is being used as the rationale for job cuts in other industries.

When one of the most celebrated voices in American cinema endorses AI for any part of the creative process, studios and streamers have the license to adopt his permission, not just his philosophy. He may be correct that cinema must evolve. But the question his announcement leaves open, and that Hollywood is trying to sort out, is who gets to decide where the tool stops.