Martin Scorsese joins AI startup Black Forest Labs as adviser

Martin Scorsese has signed on as a partner and adviser to Black Forest Labs, according to a report from The New York Times published on Tuesday. The caveat to this arrangement is that the Hollywood director is using the technology solely for storyboarding, which is defined as the process of creating visual representations of a film sequence. Scorsese plans to use the startup’s tools to communicate his creative vision to cinematographers and production designers far faster and more efficiently. “For 70 years, I’ve been creating my own storyboards,” Scorsese said in a statement to the Times, explaining that the technology will assist him in accelerating his creative process.

Black Forest Labs is a 70-person startup headquartered in Freiburg, Germany—the closest major city to the actual Black Forest—rather than San Francisco. Despite its unlikely address, the company was last valued at $3.25 billion by its investors. Those backers include BroadLight Capital, an investment firm co-founded by Rick Yorn, who also serves as Scorsese’s talent manager. The startup’s technology currently powers image-generation features inside several platforms, including:

• Adobe
• Canva
• Microsoft
• Meta

The startup was founded by the team behind Stable Diffusion, which serves as the technology origin for the company’s current models. This technical background has positioned Black Forest Labs as a key player in the AI space, though the company has recently rejected some high-profile alliances. According to a report by Wired, Black Forest Labs declined to partner with Elon Musk’s xAI in recent months. This decision followed an earlier collaboration on the image generator for Grok, which reportedly ended amid concerns about the platform’s content safeguards.

The partnership represents a notable development for the entertainment industry, where resistance to artificial intelligence has historically been strong. Even with the limited scope of Scorsese’s storyboarding use case, the collaboration indicates a shift in how Hollywood creators view these tools. While some in the entertainment industry may express concern over the development, the deal highlights a growing willingness to integrate the technology into the creative process.

Why it matters

The partnership marks a significant shift in Hollywood’s stance toward AI, as the director adopts the technology for his creative process.