Martin Scorsese Quietly Joined an AI Company

Martin Scorsese quietly joined an AI company, and he's not the only director who crossed over. We go looking for what still needs a human. Martin Scorsese signed on as an advisor to Black Forest Labs, the startup behind the Flux image models, and now uses AI to storyboard his films. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop break down what Scorsese actually endorsed (storyboarding, not "an app made the movie"), why Guillermo del Toro says he would rather die than touch generative AI, and how James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Darren Aronofsky, and Ben Affleck (who sold his own AI company to Netflix) all landed on the other side. We get into pre-visualization, the first fully AI-generated film at the Tribeca Film Festival ("Dreams of Violets," about the Iran protests), and why a Scorsese-grade ten-second clip costs about a dollar but falls apart the second you push past ten seconds. Then the fight: is AI art real art? We argue the modern-art scam, the blank canvas that sold for twelve million, the urinal as art, and whether art lives in the finished piece or the human intent behind it. Quentin Tarantino built a career remixing shots from other directors' films, so what makes a machine doing the same thing theft? And it is not only art. A Stanford Law study had Gemini 2.5 Pro and NotebookLM answer contract-law questions next to real professors, and a blind panel of law professors preferred the AI answers 75% of the time. If a machine can out-teach a law professor and out-storyboard a legend, what is the specifically human part we keep insisting on? They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold Open (Gary's Intro) 2:02 Talking Like the AI 4:11 Scorsese and Black Forest Labs 9:54 AI Video at Tribeca 11:51 Del Toro Versus the Tool 17:43 Directors Embracing AI 22:10 Tarantino and the Remix 24:34 Is AI Art Real Art 30:26 AI Beats Law Professors 35:18 AI as a Better Teacher REFERENCED THIS EPISODE Martin Scorsese x Black Forest Labs (the video we point to): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4jl4htAcuM Tribeca's first fully AI-generated film, "Dreams of Violets": https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/13/movies/ai-tribeca-dreams-violets-iran.html The Stanford Law study where AI beat the professors: https://law.stanford.edu/press/ai-outperforms-law-professors-in-stanford-law-study/ LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE 🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc 🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLUR Follow: @TheBlurAI COMMENT Hunter says the urinal is art because a human meant something by it. Daniel says it's a scam. So if the machine makes the piece and also writes the tragic-artist backstory on the placard, is it still art, or did the placard just con you? You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur. New episodes Monday and Thursday. #MartinScorsese #AIArt #BlackForestLabs #AI #TMBSA