Martin Scorsese has officially joined forces with Black Forest Labs, an AI image-generation startup, as a partner and adviser, as reported by the New York Times on Tuesday. The catch? One of the most celebrated living directors is using this technology exclusively for storyboarding. "For 70 years, I’ve been creating my own storyboards," he told the Times. He added that the tool allows him to convey his creative vision to cinematographers and production designers much more quickly and effectively.

Black Forest Labs is a relatively small company with 70 employees, headquartered not in Silicon Valley but in Freiburg, Germany—the nearest major city to the actual Black Forest. Despite its unconventional location, the startup powers image-generation features for major platforms like Adobe, Canva, Microsoft, and Meta. Its latest valuation stands at $3.25 billion, backed by investors including BroadLight Capital, which was co-founded by Scorsese’s talent manager, Rick Yorn.

The company was founded by the original team behind Stable Diffusion. According to Wired, Black Forest Labs recently declined a partnership with Elon Musk’s xAI—the second time it has done so, following an earlier collaboration on Grok’s image generator that ended due to concerns over content safeguards on the platform.

All of this underscores a broader shift: Scorsese’s endorsement, though limited in scope, is the latest signal that Hollywood’s once-strong resistance to artificial intelligence is gradually fading, whether the industry is ready for it or not.