Art Directors Guild Responds to Martin Scorsese Promotion of AI Storyboarding Tool

Martin Scorsese came under renewed labor scrutiny after the Art Directors Guild issued a public response to his promotion of an artificial intelligence tool aimed at generating storyboards. The union said it objected to a recent promotional video in which Scorsese, described as an advisor to the company, demonstrated the AI system’s ability to create a storyboard image using the company’s technology.

In the video, Scorsese appeared to use the startup Black Forest Labs’ platform to produce a storyboard featuring a medieval street scene, while describing what he said the model could do. The Art Directors Guild, in its statement released this week, said the promotion sent the wrong message by emphasizing an AI workflow rather than the role of human art directors and storyboard artists.

The guild represents professionals including storyboard artists, according to its statement, and said Scorsese’s promotion amounted to turning away from the human artists who, it said, helped create memorable work during his career. The union characterized the move as an advocacy for letting generative AI perform tasks it described as belonging to Art Directors Guild Local 800 artists and designers.

The guild also quoted comments attributed to Scorsese about the creative problem of communicating what a director imagines to cast and crew. In those remarks, Scorsese was described as saying that there are “some things you have to see and feel,” and that he was interested in an “intersection of technology and storytelling,” framed around expanding creativity for audiences.

The Art Directors Guild countered that framing by arguing that the proposed solution involves generative AI doing work that has been handled by union professionals. The statement said Scorsese was promoting a generative AI product in a way that the union views as overlapping with the labor jurisdiction of its members, and it said that longstanding collaboration between directors and visual artists has been part of film production for decades.

The Hollywood Reporter reported that Scorsese’s involvement included an advisory role with Black Forest Labs at the time of the promotion and that he was featured in an advertisement for the company’s AI storyboarding approach. The story described the guild’s response as a “clap back,” focused specifically on the union implications for storyboard work and the broader question of how AI tools may affect professional artistic roles.

The next steps for the labor dispute are not detailed in the reporting. The statement from the Art Directors Guild is the central development described so far, with Scorsese’s remarks and the AI demonstration providing the basis for the guild’s complaint. Whether the company or Scorsese respond directly, or whether any labor negotiations or contract discussions are prompted, was not addressed in the report.

The controversy fits into a wider debate in Hollywood about how generative AI tools should be integrated into production workflows and who should have rights over the visual labor used to develop films. For the Art Directors Guild, the core issue presented in the statement is job jurisdiction for storyboard artists and designers, and the union said it viewed the public promotion as undermining that role rather than clarifying boundaries.