Martin Scorsese joins AI image startup Black Forest Labs as partner and adviser
Martin Scorsese is now advising an AI company. The director joined Black Forest Labs, a Freiburg-based image startup valued at 3.25 billion dollars, as partner and adviser, per the New York Times. He uses its FLUX model for storyboarding. Whether he invested himself is unconfirme
Martin Scorsese is now advising an AI company, and the choice of company is notable: Black Forest Labs, a Freiburg, Germany startup founded in 2024 by researchers who previously built Stable Diffusion. The New York Times reported on June 2 that Scorsese signed on as partner and adviser. The director says he uses the company's FLUX image model for one specific purpose: storyboarding. In a statement published by Black Forest Labs, he said cinema is a young medium of around 125 years and has to remain open to evolution, pointing to his earlier use of 3D in Hugo and de-aging technology in The Irishman. He says the tool lets him share what he is visualizing with his production designer and cinematographer faster, saving time and money in pre-production. The connection came through BroadLight Capital, an investor in Black Forest Labs co-founded by Rick Yorn, Scorsese's manager. Whether Scorsese himself invested in the company is unconfirmed; his representative declined to comment, according to Variety. Black Forest Labs is valued at 3.25 billion dollars and its technology powers image features inside products from Adobe $ADBE, Microsoft $MSFT and Meta $META, according to TechCrunch. Scorsese joins other Oscar-winning directors engaging with AI: James Cameron sits on the board of Stability AI, while Guillermo del Toro has publicly rejected generative AI in his films.