Hollywood’s complicated romance with artificial intelligence just got a whole lot more interesting. Martin Scorsese, the 83-year-old director behind Goodfellas, Raging Bull, and The Departed, has signed on as a partner and adviser to Black Forest Labs, a fast-growing AI image generation startup.

As reported by the New York Times, Scorsese used the company’s technology during preproduction for a new film and released a video from his New York office explaining his enthusiasm. For an industry that only three years ago went on strike partly over AI protections, this is a remarkable turn of events.

Scorsese is using AI but not in the way you think

Scorsese is using AI exclusively for storyboarding, the process of visually mapping out scenes before cameras roll. He explained that for 70 years, he has drawn his own storyboards, but always struggled to communicate exactly what he sees in his head to his cinematographer, production designer, and art director.

Black Forest Labs’ technology, which builds on open AI models called FLUX, helped him solve that problem. The startup is a 70-person company based in Freiburg, Germany, currently valued at around $3.25 billion. Its technology already powers image features inside Adobe, Canva, Microsoft, and Meta.

Hollywood is warming up to AI despite protests

Scorsese isn’t alone, as plenty of other big names are moving in the same direction. Amazon MGM Studios recently unveiled three AI-generated animated series for children, and Netflix is building an internal studio called INKubator to produce AI-generated animated content.

Val Kilmer’s likeness is also being brought back using AI technology in the upcoming film As Deep as the Grave. An AI actress named Tilly Norwood is already making waves in Hollywood, with her very existence sparking fierce debate about where the industry is headed.

Not everyone is convinced, though. Steven Spielberg voiced strong concerns publicly, making clear he opposes AI replacing human creativity in filmmaking.

Seth Rogen and Guillermo del Toro also pushed back on AI at Cannes. The debate is far from settled, but Scorsese’s endorsement suggests the conversation has moved well past if and firmly into how.

Martin Scorsese has signed on as a partner and adviser to AI image-generation startup Black Forest Labs, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

The caveat is that one of the world’s most famous living directors is using the tech solely for storyboarding.

“For 70 years, I’ve been creating my own storyboards,” he said in a statement to the Times. The tool, he said, helps him communicate his vision to cinematographers and production designers far faster and more efficiently.

Black Forest Labs is a 70-person outfit headquartered not in San Francisco, but in Freiburg, Germany, the closest major city to the actual Black Forest. Despite its unlikely address, the startup powers image features inside Adobe, Canva, Microsoft, and Meta, and was last valued at $3.25 billion by its investors, which include BroadLight Capital, co-founded by Scorsese’s talent manager, Rick Yorn.

Black Forest Labs was founded by the team behind Stable Diffusion and according to Wired, declined to partner with Elon Musk’s xAI in recent months after an earlier collaboration on Grok’s image generator ended amid concerns about the platform’s content safeguards.

You can imagine that some in the entertainment industry will be concerned about the development, even given its limited scope. Still, it’s just the newest sign that Hollywood’s once-fierce resistance to AI is softening.