The Art Directors Guild has called out Martin Scorsese for endorsing Black Forest Labs' generative AI model FLUX, labeling his move a betrayal of cinema's collaborative foundation. The guild, representing thousands of union artists, has long safeguarded the creative roles that bring a director's vision to life on screen. Now, one of Hollywood's most celebrated names has given them every reason to speak up.

While the guild takes direct aim at Scorsese, their argument that generative AI profits from stolen creative labor is the charge that lingers loudest.

The Art Directors Guild, IATSE Local 800, has formally condemned Martin Scorsese's promotion of Black Forest Labs' FLUX model, calling it a direct undercut of their members' livelihoods. The guild represents art directors, production designers, illustrators, scenic artists, set designers, and graphic artists, the very professionals Scorsese has leaned on across a decades-long career.

"The skills of Art Directors Guild Local 800 artists and designers bring the highest level of value to any film or television production," the guild stated.

It then added that using AI "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 statement also pointedly declared that generative AI ingests copyrighted work scraped from the internet without consent, credit, or compensation, making the endorsement all the more stinging.

The guild's frustration runs deeper than one director's preproduction shortcut. FLUX, developed by Black Forest Labs, generates visual storyboards through a text-to-image generative model, doing in seconds what a human illustrator or production designer would spend days crafting. The ADG argues that this work falls squarely within their jurisdiction and that Scorsese's public promotion of FLUX as a solution to visualizing creative ideas essentially sidelines the very collaborators who made his films iconic.

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As the guild makes its case for human artistry, the details of how far Martin Scorsese has already taken this AI partnership tell a far bigger story.

Martin Scorsese joined Black Forest Labs as an advisor approximately a year before the partnership went public in June 2026, with his talent manager, Rick Yorn, who also invests in the company through BroadLight Capital, reportedly facilitating the relationship. In a promotional video shot at his New York City office, Scorsese used FLUX to storyboard a medieval street scene, drawing a parallel to his earlier experiments with technology, including 3D in Hugo and de-aging in The Irishman. He stated that cinema, being only around 125 years old, must remain open to evolution.

The technology may have already quietly informed his upcoming film, What Happens at Night, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, which recently wrapped production. The AI-generated storyboard imagery, depicting a snowy, historical Eastern European setting, bears a resemblance to the first-look visuals Apple released in March. For Scorsese, FLUX is purely a preproduction tool that speeds up visual communication without replacing final craft. For the ADG, however, his endorsement of a product built on potentially stolen creative work is a line that should never have been crossed.

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What are your thoughts on the Art Directors Guild calling out Martin Scorsese's AI endorsement? Let us know in the comments.