I remember reading or watching something years ago about the weird convergence and flattening of scores in big budget films. The argument — which I don’t have enough direct knowledge to verify but sure seemed convincing at the time — was that directors used temporary, preexisting tracks in the early stages of production, with the understanding that a composer would be providing the actual music later. But inevitably, these temporary scores end up influencing the director’s (and by extension the composer’s) expectations for how the actual music should sound. It’s a process that pulls all music towards a muddled average of everything that’s come before.

Anyway that’s what I thought of when I saw the news that Martin Scorsese is embracing generative AI for previsualization work — e.g., storyboarding — on movies. It’s depressing as fuck but my immediate takeaway, apart from the obvious impact on actual artists who have storyboarding jobs, is that using generative AI in this way represents a devolution of a filmmaker’s ability to imagine things. The images created this way will inevitably have a strong influence on the final film, but they represent, not a particular human’s visual creativity, but a weird, blurred average of the system’s training data. And perhaps more importantly, the use of generative AI to realize a “director’s vision” (which seems to be Scorsese’s primary concern) will diminish the power of everyone else involved in the making of a film to influence what it looks like.

It’s hard not to see this as a way for film directors to exercise what they see as absolute control over their productions? Even though they are, ironically, outsourcing their vision to a technology that undermines the ability to do so.