Martin Scorsese, of all people, just signed on with an AI startup

Martin Scorsese has become the latest Hollywood heavyweight to embrace artificial intelligence — but with a very specific, and limited, use in mind. The legendary director has signed on as a partner and adviser to Black Forest Labs, an AI image-generation company based in Germany, according to a report from The New York Times.

Scorsese, who has hand-drawn his own storyboards for seven decades, says the technology will help him get his visual ideas across to cinematographers and production designers much faster. “For 70 years, I’ve been creating my own storyboards,” he told the Times. The AI tool, he explained, lets him communicate his vision more efficiently.

Black Forest Labs is a small outfit of about 70 people, located not in Silicon Valley but in Freiburg, Germany, near the actual Black Forest. Despite its offbeat location, the startup’s technology already powers image features inside Adobe, Canva, Microsoft, and Meta. Investors recently valued the company at $3.25 billion. Among those investors is BroadLight Capital, co-founded by Scorsese’s own talent manager, Rick Yorn.

The company was founded by the team behind Stable Diffusion. According to Wired, Black Forest Labs recently turned down a partnership with Elon Musk’s xAI after an earlier collaboration on Grok’s image generator raised concerns about content safeguards.

Some in Hollywood may bristle at the news, even given the narrow scope of Scorsese’s involvement. But it’s another sign that the industry’s once-rigid resistance to AI is starting to ease.