Stephen Lemons

“I'll tell you right out, I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk.”

[Super 70s Sports @Super70sSports]

“I must be in the front row.”

[Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex]

Suno - a company that trained on "essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet", and argues it does not need to pay to do so - is now valued at $5.4 billion.

They will pay for GPUs, and for engineers, but not, apparently, for the music they use - other people's music - without which their models would not work.

I know lots of musicians who will be upset. I am with them.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Martin Scorsese, the director of Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street, once called Marvel blockbusters “almost like AI making a film.” He meant it as an insult. That was 2023. This week, at 83, he signed on as a paid adviser to an actual AI company.

The company is Black Forest Labs, a small German firm founded by some of the researchers who kicked off the AI image boom. Its software turns a sentence you type into a finished picture, and it already runs inside Adobe, Canva, Microsoft, and Meta. The whole thing is worth $3.25 billion. Scorsese attached his name last year, and this week the company cashed in that prestige with a press release and a slick promo video of him using it. Its CEO called Scorsese “a great proof point that this works.”

Scorsese did not find this company on his own. His longtime manager, Rick Yorn, brought him in, and Yorn’s investment firm has a stake in it. So one of cinema’s most protective voices is now the public face of a company his own manager invested in.

What he did with the tool is small. He used it to picture what a snowy town might look like for his next film, the rough drawings directors call storyboards. There is no AI in the movie, and the movie already finished shooting.

But storyboarding is a job. Scorsese draws his own. Plenty of directors pay artists to do it, and that drawing is the exact task this software now does for free. Somewhere there is an artist who learned the craft from Scorsese’s own storyboards for Taxi Driver, and this week their hero put his name behind the machine built to replace them.

He is not a sellout for liking new tools. He shot Hugo in 3D and made Robert De Niro look decades younger for The Irishman. For years he has spent his own money rescuing old films from rotting in vaults. The man clearly loves movies.

That is what stings. The loudest voice for keeping movies human just lent that voice to a tool that does a human’s job for free. His own storyboards are safe. It is the next director’s storyboard artist who becomes an optional line in the budget.

[Stephen Lemons @stephenlemons]

@NME The Irishman sucked

[Maggie McNeill @Maggie_McNeill]

@stephenlemons He's 84 years old; sometimes dementia is subtle.

[Womp Stomp Films @wompstompfilms]

@NME

[Stephen Lemons @stephenlemons]

Why did The Irishman suck balls? See below.

[BuBBliK @k1rallik]

> be Martin Scorsese
> son of Sicilian immigrants, almost a priest
> pick film instead
> make Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Departed
> 10 Best Director Oscar nominations, most of any living director
> win it exactly once
> spend decades guarding "real cinema"
> say Marvel movies are "not cinema"
> 2026: become advisor to an AI startup
> use it to storyboard your next film
> "cinema is young, we have to be open to how it can evolve"

The guy who gatekept cinema hardest just handed the keys to a robot.

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

this is legit funny.

[Stephen Lemons @stephenlemons]

Man, what a joke...

[Variety @Variety]

Martin Scorsese is backing an AI company to “push the bounds of creativity to create deeper and richer experiences for audiences.” He is using the technology for storyboarding purposes.

"I’m interested in the intersection of technology and storytelling, and seeing how that can push the bounds of creativity to create deeper and richer experiences for audiences. Cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve. I utilized 3D with ‘Hugo’ and de-aging technology for ‘The Irishman.’ Now, with this tool, I can share what I’m visualizing more clearly and efficiently to my creative team — the production designer, art designer, and cinematographer — for them to build on to enrich cinematic intelligence."

https://t.co/53G0q5wFur

[Blaze Binges @BlazeBinges]

An important message from the original She-Ra show

[Stephen Lemons @stephenlemons]

The Irishman sucked.

[Futurism @futurism]

"Cannot stress enough how disappointing it is that Martin Scorsese is collaborating with an AI company and putting a stain on his name so late in his life and career." https://t.co/zmJDerwwSw

[Futurism @futurism]

"Cannot stress enough how disappointing it is that Martin Scorsese is collaborating with an AI company and putting a stain on his name so late in his life and career." https://t.co/zmJDerwwSw

[Stephen Lemons @stephenlemons]

Elvis lives...
https://t.co/gGWvzN3hHT

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

Weird how the Pope seems to understand AI better than @geoffreyhinton, but I am 100% with the Pope on this.

We are NOT creating beings. The Pope is right.

We are creating interactive fiction that is trained to predict the language of actual beings.

Those two are NOT the same. And Hinton should know better.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

🚨 HOLY SHIT.

A U.S. citizen just testified before the Senate that ICE agents ignored his passport, detained him, placed him on suicide watch, and released him WITHOUT charges or explanation.

Read that again.

An AMERICAN CITIZEN says he showed agents his passport multiple times…

and still ended up locked in a cell under 24/7 lights, stripped naked, wearing a hospital gown while guards watched him constantly.

His family reportedly had no idea where he was.

Then after all of that?

No charges.
No explanation.
Just released.

[Kai Newkirk for Congress @kai_newkirk]

I was proud to join Ahwatukee residents to oppose the Menlo Digital data center being built right in the middle of a residential neighborhood. We must take action to halt the construction of any new AI data centers.

#AZ04 #datacenters

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

U.S. tech billionaires are flat-out lying.

China did not tell us that we don’t need any more data centers in the United States.

The facts did: The US already has 5,381 data centers to China’s 449.

[Jack @jackcoder0]

Two economists just published a mathematical proof that AI will destroy the economy.

Not might. Not could. Will — if nothing changes.

The paper is called "The AI Layoff Trap." Published March 2, 2026. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Boston University. Peer reviewed. Mathematically modeled.
The conclusion is one sentence.
"At the limit, firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand."

An economy that produces everything. And sells it to nobody.
Here is how you get there.
A company fires 500 workers and replaces them with AI. A competitor fires 700 to keep up. Another fires 1,000. Every company is behaving rationally. Every company is following the incentives correctly. And every company is building a trap for itself.

Because the workers who were fired were also customers.
When they lose their jobs faster than the economy can absorb them, they stop spending. Consumer demand falls. Companies respond by cutting costs — which means automating more workers — which means less spending — which means more falling demand — which means more automation.

The loop has no natural exit.
The researchers tested every proposed solution. Universal basic income. Capital income taxes. Worker equity participation. Upskilling programs. Corporate coordination agreements.
Every single one failed in the model.
The only intervention that worked: a Pigouvian automation tax — a per-task levy charged every time a company replaces a human with AI, forcing them to price in the demand they are destroying before they pull the trigger.

No government has implemented this. No major economy is seriously discussing it.
Meanwhile the numbers are already tracking the curve. 100,000 tech workers laid off in 2025. 92,000 more in the first months of 2026. Jack Dorsey fired half of Block's workforce and said publicly: "Within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion."
Nobody is doing anything wrong. Companies are following their incentives perfectly. That is exactly the problem.

Rational behavior. At scale. Simultaneously. With no mechanism to stop it.
Two economists built the math. The math leads to one place.

Source: Falk & Tsoukalas · Wharton School + Boston University ·

[Stephen Lemons @stephenlemons]

@azcapmedia He's justly proud of his Silver Beaver...

[Ansley Brown @Ansleysgarden]

My entire community is showing up to stop the data center takeover happening in Coweta County. This was just 1 of 4 places you could sign this petition.