If you wanted one image to capture where cinema and artificial intelligence stand in 2026, you could do worse than this: Martin Scorsese, the director who defined five decades of American film, testing AI storyboards in his New York office. The Scorsese AI story broke as SuperAI Day Two got under way in Singapore — and nobody there saw it as a coincidence.
Scorsese is now an adviser to Black Forest Labs, the German AI research company founded in 2024 and led by CEO Robin Rombach. Its FLUX image-generation models have already entered his workflow: the director has used the tool to storyboard sequences for an upcoming film, as reported byDubai.News.
Why Scorsese says yes to AI — on his terms
His reasoning is practical rather than ideological. Cinema, he argues, is a young art form at roughly 125 years old, and it has always absorbed new technology — he points to his own use of 3D onHugoand de-aging onThe Irishman. FLUX, in his telling, simply lets him show a production designer or cinematographer the image in his head faster.
In a demonstration video, he even revisited the famous Copacabana tracking shot fromGoodfellas— a sequence whose every step had to be planned in painstaking detail — as the kind of pre-production problem such tools could accelerate. Pre-production costs money, he noted, and the tool let his team move faster without sacrificing quality or craft.
A divided Hollywood watches
The endorsement carries weight precisely because Hollywood is split. James Cameron sits on Stability AI's board, and Peter Jackson has compared AI to just another special effect. On the other side, Guillermo del Toro has said he would rather die than use generative AI, and the Art Directors Guild publicly criticised Scorsese's move as a threat to storyboard and concept artists' livelihoods. The Tribeca Festival, meanwhile, is preparing a 75-minute AI-generated docudrama — the technology is arriving on every front at once.
The SuperAI Day Two connection
That collision of cinema and AI is exactly the lane Sheeraz Hasan has claimed. The fame strategist behind Hollywood.AI and Bollywood.AI spent SuperAI Day Two in Singapore making the same argument Scorsese just made by example: AI is becoming part of how films get planned, designed and sold, and the brands that bridge entertainment and the technology will own the moment.
When the director ofGoodfellasand the founder pitching "Do you have the tech? We have the brands" land on the same thesis in the same week, the debate about whether AI belongs in filmmaking starts to sound settled. The remaining question — the one both men are betting on — is who builds the tools and brands everyone else will use.