Boots Riley

Boots Riley (born 1971) is a rapper, communist organizer, and filmmaker — the frontman of The Coup, director of the surreal anti-capitalist satire Sorry to Bother You (2018) and the Amazon series I’m a Virgo (2023). Politics has always been the engine of his art.

The Scorsese row

In mid-2026, after Martin Scorsese endorsed the generative-AI company Black Forest Labs, Riley led a torrent of criticism. He speculated that at 83 Scorsese had been handed “a gang of money” and no longer cared how the tools were used — but he clarified that his anger was not about the personal choice: “my vitriol is not about him using it… It’s about him using his cache to promote this and attempt to push the industry toward it.”

Riley’s objection is economic rather than technophobic. Echoing Jaron Lanier, he argued that AI is really “the product of a lot of people working together who don’t know that they’re working together and aren’t getting paid for it,” and that in a fairer system the same tools could be genuinely collaborative. Under current incentives, though, he says companies are “lumping everything under AI to get money.”