According to The New York Times, director Martin Scorsese has joined AI image generation startup Black Forest Labs as a partner and consultant. The report notes that he is currently using the technology on a limited scale, primarily for film storyboarding rather than directly generating finished film content.
The scope of cooperation is limited to storyboard production.
In a statement, Scorsese said he has been personally drawing storyboards for 70 years. Now, with these tools, he can communicate his visual ideas to the director of photography and art team more quickly, improving the efficiency of pre-production communication.
This means his use of AI is more about assisting the production process, rather than having models replace the director's creative work. For the film and television industry, which has long been wary of generative AI, this kind of statement is more readily accepted.
Black Forest Labs is valued at $3.25 billion.
Black Forest Labs is headquartered in Freiburg, Germany, and has a team of approximately 70 people. Although the company is not located in the US tech hub, its image generation capabilities have been adopted by platforms such as Adobe, Canva, Microsoft, and Meta.
- Headquartered in Freiburg, Germany
- The team has approximately 70 members.
- The latest valuation is approximately US$3.25 billion.
According to reports, one of its investors, BroadLight Capital, was co-founded by Scorsese's agent, Rick Yorn.
The founding team comes from Stable Diffusion
Black Forest Labs was founded by the team behind Stable Diffusion. Wired previously reported that the company recently declined to collaborate with Musk's xAI.
The report also mentioned that the two companies had previously collaborated on Grok's image generator, but the collaboration ended due to platform content protection issues. This background has brought more attention to Black Forest Labs' collaboration boundaries with generative AI companies.
Hollywood's attitude towards AI is changing.
TechCrunch believes that Scorsese's involvement, while limited in scope, reflects a weakening of Hollywood's resistance to AI. Previously, the film and television industry had strongly opposed the risks of generative AI regarding copyright, labor substitution, and content security.
Currently, AI tools are gradually entering the mainstream production process, at least in areas such as storyboarding, concept art, and pre-production communication. For related companies, public endorsements from leading directors also help accelerate industry adoption.
