Director Martin Scorsese has signed on as a partner and advisor to AI image generation startup Black Forest Labs, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.
It should be noted that one of the world’s most famous living directors uses this technology solely for storyboarding.
“For 70 years, I’ve been creating my own storyboards,” he said in a statement to the Times. He said the tool allows him to communicate his vision to cinematographers and production designers more quickly and efficiently.
Black Forest Labs is a 70-person organization headquartered not in San Francisco but in Freiburg, Germany, the closest major city to the actual Black Forest. Despite the unlikely address, the startup powers imaging capabilities within Adobe, Canva, Microsoft and Meta, and was ultimately valued at $3.25 billion by investors including Broadlight Capital, co-founded by Scorsese talent manager Rick Yorn.
Black Forest Labs was founded by the team at Stable Diffusion and declined to work with Elon Musk’s xAI in recent months after a previous collaboration on Grok’s image generator ended amid concerns over the platform’s content protection, according to Wired.
You can imagine that some in the entertainment industry are concerned about this development, even given its limited scope. Still, this is just the latest sign that Hollywood’s once fierce resistance to AI is waning.
