Art Directors Guild condemn Martin Scorsese for AI partnership: “A betrayal”
The Art Directors Guild isn’t best pleased with Martin Scorsese, who recently partnered with AI start-up Black Forest Labs; the guild has accused Scorsese of “turning his back on the human artists”.
On June 2nd, it was announced that Scorsese has become a partner of the image generation company. The 16-time Academy Award nominee reportedly signed on to the company as a partner and advisor last year.
Now, the guild has fought back with their perspective on the disappointing matter, writing, “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?’”
The statement continued, “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.”
From the guild’s perspective, Scorsese’s promotion of this 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.”
In the official promotional video from the new company, the Taxi Driver director gushed about the “cinematic intelligence” of the tool, which he claims to use at the idea creation stage.
The guild combated this very perk, sharing, “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.”
As such, the statement concluded that suggesting that the skills and professional contributions of artists “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.”
Scorsese is one of the first major directors to embrace and endorse AI tools in the industry. Other coveted directors, such as Guillermo del Toro, have shared fiercely anti-AI messages, while Park Chan Wook deemed the technology a “danger for filmmakers”.
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