Art Directors Guild Blasts Scorsese Over Black Forest Labs AI Partnership

By Hector Herrera | June 12, 2026 | Creative

The Art Directors Guild issued a public rebuke of Martin Scorsese after AI image generation company Black Forest Labs named him as an advisor to help push AI's creative boundaries in filmmaking. The Guild's statement accused Scorsese of "turning his back on the human artists" who built his decades of films. The confrontation is the sharpest, most public fault line yet between Hollywood's craft unions and the filmmakers experimenting with AI tools — and it exposes a divide within the industry that no amount of careful public messaging is going to smooth over.

Scorsese is not an ordinary figure to pick this fight with. His films — Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Departed, Killers of the Flower Moon — represent some of the most celebrated production design in American cinema. The Art Directors Guild's members built those sets. Their argument is not abstract: a director they helped make great is now advising a company whose stated goal is to replace the workflows that employed them.

What Black Forest Labs Does

Black Forest Labs is the German AI company behind FLUX, one of the most widely used open-source image generation models. FLUX competes with Midjourney and Stable Diffusion for the professional creative market — it is used for concept art, storyboarding, production design visualization, visual effects previs, and advertising. These are not experimental uses; they are active production workflows in Hollywood, advertising agencies, and game studios.

Naming Scorsese as an advisor is a signal to the film industry that Black Forest Labs is targeting serious production use cases, not just consumer art generation. Scorsese's participation gives the company credibility in conversations with studios and producers who otherwise might treat AI image generation as a toy.

That is precisely what makes the Art Directors Guild's response so direct. This isn't a dispute about whether AI might eventually affect filmmaking — it is a dispute about a specific director lending his name to a company that is actively displacing the work of the people in his crew.

The Larger Divide

The Scorsese backlash is one data point in a broader debate that is becoming increasingly polarized.

In the "AI is just a tool" camp: Director Peter Jackson has defended AI visual tools as "just another special effect," comparable to the digital compositing revolution of the 1990s that also prompted union anxiety. Jackson's argument is that every generation of filmmakers adopted new technology that changed crew compositions and created different jobs than it eliminated.

In the "AI is existential displacement" camp: Director Guillermo del Toro has been forceful in rejecting AI creative tools, arguing that the meaning of art lies in the human struggle of making it, and that AI outputs — however impressive — are not the same thing as human creative expression. Del Toro's position resonates with craft union members precisely because it comes from a director with the creative stature to take a contrary position.

The divide is not simply between older and younger filmmakers, or between commercial and arthouse directors. It runs along a different fault line: directors who work closely with their visual development teams and feel the specificity of human craft contributions tend to side with del Toro. Directors who approach visual development more as a directorial brief to be executed quickly tend to see AI tools as efficiency gains.

What the Unions Are Actually Fighting

It is worth being specific about what the Art Directors Guild and its sibling unions in the IATSE umbrella are defending, because "AI will take our jobs" is too blunt an approximation.

The actual workflow concern is about concept art and previs — the visual development phase that happens before principal photography begins, where production designers and their crews translate a director's vision into buildable, shootable environments. This phase typically employs dozens of artists for weeks to months on a large production. AI image generation tools can now produce passable concept art iterations in minutes, at a quality level that is approaching — in some cases reaching — what a mid-tier concept artist produces in a day.

That doesn't mean production designers are going away. But it does mean the department headcount that supports a production designer is shrinking, and the artists who would have been hired as junior concept artists are not being hired. The pipeline problem for creative work is the same as for entry-level white-collar work in general: the bottom rung of the career ladder is being automated before the people who would have climbed it have a chance to develop the senior skills that remain irreplaceable.

The Certification Question

One outcome from this conflict may be union demands for AI use disclosures in film credits and contracts. The Writers Guild of America already negotiated AI-use protections in its 2023 contract — AI-generated material cannot constitute a writing credit, and studios must disclose when AI is used in the writing process. The Art Directors Guild and other IATSE locals are watching whether similar protections extend to visual workflows.

Scorsese has not publicly responded to the Guild's statement. Black Forest Labs has not commented on whether the advisory relationship changes in any way following the backlash.

What to Watch

The Guild's rebuke alone is unlikely to end Scorsese's involvement with Black Forest Labs. But it will force studios and production companies that depend on IATSE labor to be explicit in their production contracts about which AI tools are permitted in which phases. The next IATSE contract negotiation cycle — expected in 2026-2027 — will almost certainly include AI governance language for visual departments. How aggressively the Guild pursues that language will depend in part on how public conflicts like this one land with the broader membership.

Sources: Art Directors Guild Statement on Martin Scorsese AI Partnership, Variety