Art Directors Guild Slams Martin Scorsese’s AI Pivot as a Betrayal of Cinema

Martin Scorsese draws fire from the Art Directors Guild, his backing of AI tools igniting a new battle over Hollywood’s creative future.

Martin Scorsese just walked straight into the AI buzzsaw. The Art Directors Guild is publicly blasting him for promoting Black Forest Labs and its generative image model, FLUX, arguing that one of cinema ’s great collaborators is now cheering on a tool that sidelines the very artists who helped build his films. It ’s not subtle, and it’s not just about one director playing with a new toy.

What the guild is actually mad about

The Art Directors Guild (IATSE Local 800) represents thousands of union artists: art directors, production designers, illustrators, scenic artists, set designers, and graphic artists. These are the people who translate a director’s ideas into the worlds we see on screen. Their statement says Scorsese’s public embrace of FLUX undercuts that labor and promotes a product trained on other artists’ work without permission, credit, or pay. The guild has long drawn a hard line on this: when AI is built by scraping copyrighted imagery from the internet, they see it as profiting off stolen labor.

"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."

Their language is sharp for a reason. FLUX can spit out visual storyboards from text prompts in seconds — exactly the kind of conceptual art and visualization that would normally go to ADG members. The guild says that work falls squarely within their jurisdiction, and a director of Scorsese’s stature publicly endorsing a shortcut is, in their view, a very loud message about whose time and talent matters.

How Scorsese ended up here

Scorsese didn’t just like a post. He’s been advising Black Forest Labs for about a year ahead of the partnership going public in June 2026. His longtime manager Rick Yorn helped make the connection and invests in the company through BroadLight Capital. In a promotional video shot at Scorsese’s New York office, he uses FLUX to rough out a medieval street scene and frames it as part of his ongoing tech curiosity — the same impulse behind trying 3D in Hugo and digital de-aging in The Irishman. He also makes the broader case that cinema is only about 125 years old and needs to keep evolving.

Black Forest Labs, for its part, positions FLUX as a tool shaped with human taste and craft at the center. And Scorsese is equally clear about the limits: he presents FLUX as a preproduction aid, not a replacement for the real artistry that ends up on screen.

Where this collides with his next movie

Here’s the part raising eyebrows: the AI storyboards Scorsese demoed — snowy, old-world, Eastern European vibes — look a lot like the first-look images Apple released in March for his upcoming mystery thriller, What Happens at Night, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. That film recently wrapped production. No one is saying FLUX made the movie; the suggestion is that it may have helped Scorsese communicate ideas in prep. The guild’s response is that even using and promoting a tool trained on unlicensed work crosses a line.

The callout

On June 9, 2026, the ADG posted its statement on X and didn’t mince words: "Mr. Scorsese, The Business is not in flux." They also reiterated a point that’s been building across the industry for a while: they believe generative AI models are trained on copyrighted material scraped without consent, credit, or compensation — and that anyone elevating those tools is normalizing a pipeline that cuts human artists out of paid work.

Quick rundown

• The Art Directors Guild (IATSE Local 800) represents art directors, production designers, illustrators, scenic artists, set designers, and graphic artists.
• The guild says Scorsese’s endorsement of FLUX undermines their members’ livelihoods and validates AI trained on unlicensed art.
• FLUX is a text-to-image generator used for rapid storyboarding and previz — tasks the ADG says belong to its members and typically take days, not seconds.
• Scorsese has been an advisor to Black Forest Labs for about a year; his manager Rick Yorn helped broker the relationship and invests via BroadLight Capital.
• In a June 2026 promo video filmed in New York, Scorsese used FLUX to sketch a medieval street scene and compared it to past tech experiments like 3D in Hugo and de-aging in The Irishman.
• Scorsese’s position: FLUX is a preproduction tool to speed up communication, not a substitute for final craftsmanship.
• Speculation alert: the FLUX images he demoed resemble Apple’s March first-look at his mystery thriller What Happens at Night, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, which has since wrapped. Nothing official confirms FLUX was used on that film.
• On June 9, 2026, the ADG publicly rebuked Scorsese on X, arguing generative AI is built on scraped, copyrighted work without consent, credit, or compensation.

My read

This is a high-profile version of a fight that’s been brewing for a while: directors and studios love faster, cheaper visualization tools; the people who actually design the worlds on screen would like to be paid to do that work — and not replaced by a machine trained on their portfolios. Scorsese’s track record proves he respects craft, but cosigning a model the guild believes is trained on unlicensed art was always going to spark backlash. The technology may be new; the money and credit issues are not.

Where do you land on this one? Useful preproduction tool, or a very public step on the gas toward cutting out human artists?