The Art Directors Guild have released a statement criticising Martin Scorsese for promoting an AI firm.

The legendary director was recently announced as an advisor for Black Forest Labs’ AI product FLUX, talking about the possibilities of using the program for storyboarding. “Remember, cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve,” he said in promotional material for the company.

The appearance prompted the Art Directors Guild, which represents a wide range of graphic artists in the film industry, including story board artists, to release a statement with the title: “Mr. Scorsese, The Business is not in flux.”

It begins: “Oscar winning director Martin Scorsese is turning his back on the human artists who throughout his career have helped him create his most memorable works. In the recently released Black Forest Labs video promoting their generative AI product FLUX, Mr. Scorsese asks the question, ‘how do you communicate what you see in your head to your cast and crew?’ 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 statement continues: “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. Generative AI is only capable of producing this type of ‘cinematic intelligence’ by ingesting large swaths of copyrighted work, likely scraped from the internet without consent, credit, compensation, or transparency.

It concludes: “The skills of Art Directors Guild Local 800 artists and designers bring the highest level of value to any film or television production. To think their professional contributions can be mimicked or outshone by generative AI, which is built on work likely stolen from them and many other artists from around the world, is a betrayal of the collaborative nature of cinema.”

The use of AI continues to be a divisive issue in Hollywood. Last year, James Cameron said he was exploring how AI can help the film industry “cut costs in half” without “laying off half the staff”. Elsewhere, Morgan Freeman took legal action over AI copycats using his voice, saying: “You’re robbing me”. Last month, Pope Leo XIV spoke out against the dangers of the technology.

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