Even Martin Scorsese uses AI for storyboards. Can the art survive?

As Hollywood begins to adopt the technology, the professionals in most direct jeopardy are the illustrators mapping out directors’ first visions. They sketch out what could be lost

A film industry dominated by AI is a dystopian prospect: stories and dialogue generated by large language models, populated by reincarnated screen icons and uncanny humanoids. That is in the future, but the real-world impact of AI is already directly affecting jobs behind the scenes, as Hollywood’s biggest film-makers begin to adopt the technology. James Cameron – long an advocate for emerging technologies in film-making – is on the board of a gen AI firm, citing his interest in how AI will intersect with CGI; Steven Soderbergh used Meta-powered tech to create animations for his recent documentary about John Lennon; even Christopher Nolan, while dismissing the idea that AI will replace humans as “nonsense”, conceded that it will create some useful “imaging tools”.

The current canary in the coalmine however is the storyboard artist, whose work gen AI appears to have directly in its sights. Storyboard artists are the illustrators who draw the panels of images with notes and diagrams that map out scenes before they are filmed. Storyboards are used to work out how a film will look, and as a blueprint to communicate a director’s vision to cast and crew, and are one of the first steps in bringing a script off the page. Now they appear on the verge of replacement by programmes that use text prompts to create illustrations instead. Even an old-school diehard like Martin Scorsese has got on board; in June he announced a partnership with an AI firm whose text-to-image model he used in the storyboarding process for his next movie.

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