Art Directors Guild Chides Martin Scorsese Over His Newfound Fondness for AI

Art directors are really having a moment. Not only did the art director on indie sensation Obsession make waves recently with a round of discourse about compensation, but now the Art Directors Guild is drawing a line in the sand between itself and Hollywood icon Martin Scorsese after the living legend decided to align himself with a generative AI company.

In a statement, the organization that represents art department workers accused Scorsese of “turning his back on the human artists who throughout his career have helped him create his most memorable works.” The guild surely isn’t alone in that feeling, but it is particularly personal for the organization given the purposes for which Scorsese has endorsed generative AI.

In announcing that he would be partnering with Black Forest Labs, Scorsese suggested that he could use the company’s generative AI model Flux to help with the storyboarding process—visualizing the script and blocking scenes before shooting starts. “There’s always been this problem of how do you communicate what you see in your head to your cast and crew,” the director said in a statement to the New York Times. “Now with this tool I can share what I’m visualizing more clearly and efficiently to my creative team — the production designer, art designer and cinematographer.”

The Art Directors Guild represents storyboard artists, and took direct issue with Scorsese’s suggestion that he needs AI to communicate his creative process. “He claims the solution is the use of this generative AI program to do the jobs that are rightfully the jurisdiction of Art Directors Guild Local 800 artists and designers – human artists and designers who have been successfully collaborating with directors to visualize their films for decades,” the union said in a statement. “Mr. Scorsese’s promotion of a generative AI product circumvents the input of Art Directors Guild Local 800 art directors, graphic artists, illustrators, production designers, scenic artists, set designers, and other talented Union professionals.”

It also rightly pointed out that, to the extent the generative model can produce outputs that serve the needs of the director, it can only do so because it is “built on work likely stolen from them and many other artists from around the world.”

Scorsese has always been pretty open to new technology, and has also repeatedly spoken about AI as a tool for the next generation of filmmakers to figure out how to use. He’s done them the favor of figuring out one use that they absolutely should not explore.