The Art Directors Guild criticizes Martin Scorsese for his partnership with Black Forest Labs.

The Art Directors Guild condemned Martin Scorsese for promoting Black Forest Labs and its FLUX model, accusing the director of betraying human artists.

The Art Directors Guild (ADG Local 800) has publicly lashed out at Martin Scorsese after a commercial filmed for the startup Black Forest Labs, for which the filmmaker serves as an advisor. In this spot, the director creates a medieval street scene storyboard using FLUX technology and praises the model's "cinematic intelligence." According to the union, the filmmaker "turns his back on human artists" who have supported him throughout his career, and promotes a product that circumvents the work of its members—art directors, illustrators, production designers, and other visual design crafts.

Scorsese, who has long drawn his own storyboards, presents the tool as a previsualization aid: a way to communicate his vision more clearly to his team and, in his words, to cause "less wear and tear on the crew." He points out that he previously used 3D on Hugo Cabret and digital de-aging on The Irishman, and advocates for cinema to be open to its evolution.

The union's rebuttal is based on two arguments: job displacement in already vulnerable professions (the ADG's membership decreased from 3,492 members in 2022 to 2,966 in 2025), and the origin of the training data, with the union asserting that this "cinematic intelligence" is only achieved by ingesting large volumes of copyrighted works, presumably obtained without consent or compensation. It is unknown at this stage whether Scorsese has used the technology on his upcoming feature film, What Happens at Night, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence.