Martin Scorsese has become Hollywood’s latest voice on artificial intelligence, and it’s unlikely

Martin Scorsese has signed on as a partner and advisor to AI photo-production startup Black Forest Labs, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

The caveat is that one of the world’s most famous living directors only uses technology in storyboarding.

“For 70 years, I have been creating my own comics,” he told the Times. He said this tool helps him communicate his vision to cinematographers and production designers faster and more efficiently.

Black Forest Labs is a 70-person group headquartered not in San Francisco, but in Freiburg, Germany, the closest major city to the actual Black Forest. Despite its unlikely title, the startup powers photo features within Adobe, Canva, Microsoft and Meta, and was last valued at $3.25 billion by its investors, which include BroadLight Capital, which was co-founded by Scorsese’s talent manager Rick Yorn.

Black Forest Labs was founded by the team behind Stable Diffusion and, according to Wired, declined to partner with Elon Musk’s xAI in recent months — the second time after a previous collaboration on Grok’s image generator ended amid concerns about the platform’s content guarantees.

All of this is to say that Scorsese’s endorsement, though limited in scope, is just the latest sign that Hollywood’s fierce resistance to AI is waning, whether the industry likes it or not.