Martin Scorsese has signed on as a partner and advisor at AI image creation startup Black Forest Labs, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
The catch is that one of the world’s most famous living directors uses this technique exclusively for storyboards.
“I’ve been making my own storyboards for 70 years,” he told the Times. He said the tool helps him communicate his vision to cinematographers and production designers much faster and more efficiently.
Black Forest Labs is a 70-person research institute headquartered not in San Francisco but in Freiburg, Germany, the closest major city to the actual Black Forest. Despite the unexpected address, the startup powers image capabilities inside Adobe, Canva, Microsoft and Meta, and was last valued at $3.25 billion by investors including BroadLight Capital, co-founded by Scorsese’s talent manager Rick Yorn.
Black Forest Labs was founded by the Stable Diffusion team and, according to Wired, has declined to partner with Elon Musk’s xAI in recent months. This is the second time Grok’s initial collaboration with the image generator ended due to concerns about content protection on the platform.
Scorsese’s endorsement, although limited in scope, is just the latest sign that Hollywood’s once fierce resistance to AI is easing, whether the industry likes it or not.
