Martin Scorsese Is Embracing A.I. | Hacker News Reader

Martin Scorsese Is Embracing A.I.

nytimes.com

52 pointsstephen3756 comments

TFA says he's using it for storyboarding. This doesn't seem like a huge deal, but film is a visual medium! The closer your pre-viz and storyboarding looks to reality, the more you're going to tend to stick to it when you're actually filming.

You want your rough drafts to have a roughness that conveys your level of confidence. If your AI first draft looks polished people may feel more pressure not to deviate.

I find these hand-drawn Taxi Drivers storyboards very charming even though they obviously don't map cleanly to shots in the film. This is what you're giving up if you just tell an AI "give me a close up of Travis Bickle's face"

https://boords.com/blog/martin-scorseses-hand-drawn-taxi-dri...

> TFA says he's using it for storyboarding.

I'm not a fan of AI but this seems like a legit use for it. Story boarding is basically film prototyping, and one of AI's legit uses seems to be prototyping.

I've noticed a tendency among people who have built careers known for visionary, forward-thinking work that they hesitate to make the natural move into more "conservative" positions/approaches as they age. This leads to missteps, because as one ages, one inevitably becomes further removed from the zeitgeist. On paper, embracing AI might seem like a great idea if you don't want to become an old fogey, but not all changes are positive and I doubt this decision will age well

Given that, according to the article, he's just using it for storyboarding, in attempt to better communicate a vision to a range of human contributors, it's really unclear how this decision will "age badly." either this is a stronger way to create storyboards or it isn't.

Presumably he has the experience to evaluate if this is likely to actually help or not. Or at least if it is worth exploring.

It is rather unclear why you believe he is likely wrong, aside from conjuring up rather ageist speculations about his motives.

>On paper, embracing AI might seem like a great idea if you don't want to become an old fogey, but not all changes are positive and I doubt this decision will age well

I imagine the whole industry is going to use more and more AI. There may be some hiccups on the forefront but I definitely dont think it will be some direction that gets abandoned.

AI is just the next step in VFX. Game studios are leaning into it heavily for asset generation as well. These assets are still hand touched for style and composed by humans, but a lot of this work was previously done by outsourced workers/art grunts/asset packs so it's not really a quality loss.

Money is also a huge factor in becoming removed from the zeitgeist.

> I doubt this decision will age well

Honestly, I don’t think Marty’s “decision” to use generative AI to storyboard will even become a thing that ages.

But let’s say it doesn’t “age well”. What would that mean? Would it mean we’ve turned into a society that looks down on people on using AI tools at ANY stage in a creative process?

Is that where you think we’re going?

I am also curious whether a knee-jerk reaction to seeing the word A.I and assuming the worst will age well. It's not just you, this is media writ large now.

Martin Scorsese is using AI to build better pre-viz tools not create scenes and write scripts, but that detail is completely lost on the literati. The reactions roll in.

It's going to be conveniently forgotten, like the people that were screaming at people for not wearing masks outside months (years!) after we understood covid.

As a conflict averse society, we excuse people that indulge in these kinds of behaviors once they reach a critical mass. It's kind of like a conversion disorder.

Covid is a good analogy here. We went seemingly overnight to righteous indignation to cold and flu commercials advertising their products so you can go to work sick.

It's cool right now to dislike ai, and there are plenty of charlatans that are ready to harness that for whatever new outrage.

We live in such an information dense world that people will form very strong beliefs about things overnight, castigate those that don't agree with them, and then shed them just as fast when no longer conveniently held.

Well said

I think talented people will make great use of AI. They don't just prompt "make me a movie about stereotypical Italian Americans, and make it good". They observe the end result, tweak and do the manual work when needed. It's just another tool in the toolbox. Same as with coding.

A.I. like in generating crowds, simulating physics, improving effects... or Large Language Models and Image Generation?

AI means a lot of different things, I wish I could read the article.

generative ai for story-boarding.

(i typically find nytimes works if you disable scripts)

Martin Scorsese x Black Forest Labs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4jl4htAcuM

Giftet Link from Reddit: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/business/media/martin-sco...

(Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1tur7ku/comment/opb...)

That's right. All their computers will have grammarly installed by default now. /jk

Ai is too broad a term even when it comes to movies. Which part of the pipeline will include an AI tool? Or are we saying he is going to prompt Seedance to generate an entire movie?

he specifically mentions generative ai for storyboarding in the article

Mr. Scorsese declined an interview request. But it was clear that his A.I. endorsement had limits. His statement and accompanying video were entirely related to storyboarding, which is the process of visually mapping out a film before cameras roll.

An imo fascinating wrinkle that the article doesn't get into, Black Forest's main use case for their Flux models is "analytical" (modifying the user's pre-existing material, storyboards in this case) rather than "generative" (modifying stored material from the model's training corpus). In my experience with these tools so far, the analytical approach is more filmmaker-friendly, with image models fitting comfortably into well-established rendering and compositing roles. Meanwhile my current guess is that creative applications of the generative approach are going to end up looking a lot more like gamedev than filmmaking.

> “…modifying the user's pre-existing material, storyboards in this case…”

Let me understand this. You’re saying this Flux model takes as input your own images and drawings and then modifies them only?

If I understand this correctly, then it would get past the authorship safeguards public llms put up every time you ask for an illustration in the “style of”. Yes?

Martin Scorsese is backing Black Forest Labs, the company famous for FLUX models.

Not to be confused with the other Flux that is currently having a legal dispute with Adafruit.

Backing as in vouching for, or backing as in investing in?

> Martin Scorsese, the living embodiment of cinema as high art and a conscience for modern Hollywood

That's some ChatGPT-level glazing. No one thinks this. Unless they also think that, like, Bob Dylan is the voice of Gen Z.

What’s that? Closer to the hole sir???

I think it would be fair to say he is the living embodidment of cinema and end the sentence.

This is simply old fashioned Hollywood-level glazing, which has always made ChatGPT-level glazing look scathing by comparison.

This is a recession indicator.

My comment won't add anything meaningful to the discussion, but this does seem to validate the new AI slop being generated on YouTube and other social media platforms, with influencers starting a new wave under the motto. If Marty embraces it, why not us? /s

gross

Easy to do when you're 83 and won't be around to suffer the consequences.

To me this feels like being edgy on purpose… “Look everybody, I’m still relevant!”

I’m going to be around for the consequences. What do you project them to be?

Scorcese understands that Hollywood's ultimate limiting factor is the number of available actors. A finite pool of actors means a finite pool of movies. Removing this limitation means that, just like an AI image generator can generate any image imaginable, a future movie generator will be able to generate every movie imaginable, at the click of a button.

Wouldn’t that devalue movies, though? For the consumer is great, but for the people in the industry… I guess it doesn’t sound that great?

Why would anyone want that? I don't want infinite movies, I don't have infinite time. I'd rather have intent over quantity. There is already an abundance of content, a century of cinema. Who actually wants this and why?

But what if you could have the movie you want exactly with the story and characters as you envision them. You may not want that still, but I guarantee you there are people that will.

I read books and watch movies to engage and be moved by stories I didn't know I wanted, that surprise me and/or leave me thinking for a while.

I loved Annihilation and it's sequels, not knowing what I was getting into. I would never have come up with those stories. And a one to one translation of the text to screen would have left us without an interesting movie on its own right.

whats the point of media so customized nobody else gets it?

its not like you're writing a story for yourself.

When there is a large portion of society that realises this is a way to say, "what if I had every social interaction in the setting I want, with the characters I want, with the response I want, where I say exactly the right thing" and choose to spend all of their leisure hours generating imaginary worlds to make them feel better there will still be people saying, "and so what if they do? If people will pay for it, ultimately the market decides"

They would end up extremely bored very soon.

Sounds horrible and mind-numbing to me.

But yes you're right, some people are probably seeking that in their media consumption.

There is not a shortage of actors.

So much so people do anything to try to become an actor, the ones that make i are an incredibly small fraction of the actual pool. Worse, most of those you see on the screen are also not rich or making bank, sometimes they're just paying the bills.

One has to come to LA (ideally live there a bit) to see with their own eyes the amount of people trying to break through in movie industry.

Armies of wanna-be actors and actresses, but also ie screenwriters. We only see publicly the result of many consecutive layers of filters/funnels.

It's an old running joke that most waiters/baristas/etc in LA are aspiring actors. It's part of the reason that service workers in LA are so uncommonly hot on average.

Broadway and off-broadway are the same.

Instead of using AI actors, couldn't we address Hollywood's actor shortage some other way?

For example, we could tap the federal Strategic Actor Reserve, or import actors from actor-rich countries such as France and Belgium.

We could invade other countries and take their actors. We could reinstate the actor's draft or do mandatory 1-2 years actor's service like some other countries do

There is no actor shortage.

There is, however, a large shortage of sense of humor.

I don't think anyone living in LA would claim there's a shortage of actors.

There is a huge surplus of actors.

I HIGHLY doubt that's his POV. Almost all directors, and he has said this himself many times, think of actors as collaborators and their performances as an essential part of the movie.

What does this random sentiment have to do with the article, which is about him using a particular tool for storyboarding, which is a process of communicating a vision to a range of human contributors?

There is absolutely not a shortage of actors.

There's a shortage of actors that you can star in movies to sell enough tickets to justify making $200m movies that have traditionally been the backbone of studio profits.

The studios probably killed themselves going all-in balls-to-the wall on making the exact same blockbuster movie 12 times a year, every year, for 25 years straight.

It is a refreshing breath of relief to see all the Indie stuff absolutely killing it as of late, and the Action Hero movies consistently underperforming studio expectations by a mile.

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