Hollywood's ongoing war over generative AI just found a new front line inside a franchise that could least afford one.
DC Studios and Warner Bros. pulled a behind-the-scenes featurette for Supergirl from YouTube after it received widespread backlash over footage showing director Craig Gillespie's team using AI-generated concept art of Jason Momoa as Lobo.
Entertainment news account DiscussingFilm posted the AI segment Thursday morning, and it blew past 2.5 million views within hours. By early afternoon, the video was gone, with reports stating Warner Bros. Discovery yanked it off YouTube as the criticism mounted.
The roughly six-minute video, titled "Jason Momoa as Lobo," sparked immediate backlash after fans noticed Gillespie showing Momoa what appeared to be AI-generated concept art. Amounting to just four seconds, the footage shows Gillespie and Momoa looking at a laptop screen with around a dozen images of the Lobo character that clearly resemble Momoa.
Viewers immediately clocked the telltale soft, blurred lighting typical of generative image tools. Comments were quick to call out the fact that it looked like the concept art was AI-generated.
The same featurette can still be seen in the special features of the Supergirl digital release, but could potentially be pulled as well. As of this writing, neither Gillespie, James Gunn, nor the studio has issued any public comment addressing the footage or the decision to remove it.
The timing is brutal.
Supergirl was a critical failure at 52% on Rotten Tomatoes and one of the biggest superhero movie box office flops in recent memory, ending its theatrical run with a dismal $125.8 million, making it the lowest-grossing DC movie since 2004's Catwoman.
Milly Alcock's DC film opened with just $37.1 million domestically, far below its $55 million projection, on a substantial $170 million production budget with $120 million in marketing. An AI controversy is about the last thing anyone at Warner Bros.
Discovery wanted attached to this title's digital rollout, which is supposed to give the film a second chance.
Why Are Fans So Angry?
The hypocrisy angle is what fans have locked onto hardest.
At NYCC in October 2025, DC Comics president Jim Lee declared: "DC Comics will not support AI-generated storytelling or art, not now, not ever, as long as Anne DePies and I are in charge." Lee went further, calling out the imperfections of hand-drawn work as its soul: "That's the point, the smudge, the rough line, the hesitation, that's what makes my work come alive. AI doesn't dream, feel or make art, it aggregates it."
According to people in the room during that speech, the place erupted in cheers.
Fans are now weaponizing that quote against the studio's film division.
The disconnect is obvious: Lee governs DC's publishing arm, while Supergirl sits under DC Studios and Warner Bros. Pictures. Different leaders, different budgets, different oversight. But to audiences watching a Lobo design session play out on a laptop full of AI-generated faces, the corporate org chart doesn't mean much. The DC logo appears on both.
Much of the criticism online centered on the fact that Lobo has existed in DC Comics since 1983, created by Roger Slifer and Keith Giffen, meaning the studio had access to more than four decades of official comic book artwork it could have drawn from instead.
Thousands of fan-made illustrations of Momoa as Lobo have floated around the internet for years, freely available. That a $170 million production chose to run images through an AI generator rather than hand the work to a concept artist struck many as absurd.
YouTuber Kirby, host of the series Comic Krakle, said: "It's not too much to ask the people adapting these books to respect the artists, but y'know, it's not surprising considering how Gunn is able to speak more about writers' contributions than the artists."
Meanwhile, Captaincupkirk discussed the optics of a film with this budget not paying a concept artist: "Any use of generative AI is awful, but it's especially insulting when you have a $180M budget and still don't pay someone to make concept art."
Not everyone has piled on. A vocal minority is pushing back, arguing that what Gillespie did was simple concepting, not final production design.
One X user argued: "Craig Gillespie looking through generated images of Jason Momoa as Lobo while figuring out a design did not write SUPERGIRL. It didn't direct Milly Alcock. It didn't decide whether the movie worked. It's fucking concepting."
It should also be stated that there's no indication AI was used for anything shown in the final cut of the actual film, and it hasn't been verified with certainty that the imagery was in fact AI-generated.
Fair enough on the technical point. But the reaction is about more than this one clip. Reports have surfaced that Lanterns, the upcoming DC series for HBO, apparently had AI imagery sitting on one of its production mood boards.
If true, a pattern is forming. While AI hasn't been confirmed elsewhere, the revelation has cast doubts on other areas of Supergirl's production and, by extension, the broader DCU pipeline.
Given the high budget, critics are saying it's even more egregious compared to an independent, low-budget production looking to cut costs, and part of the argument is that it takes work away from artists who could have potentially been paid to draw concept art by hand.
The anti-AI art community, already galvanized by years of tension with Silicon Valley and major studios, has turned this into a rallying cry. Some of the most widely shared posts are explicitly calling for regulations banning AI-assisted films from theatrical release entirely.
The Streisand effect is doing what it always does. Removing the video ensured more people saw the clip than ever would have if Warner Bros. had left the featurette up and let it die quietly among the bonus features. The clip went viral before the takedown, and it's everywhere now.
The controversy is notable given that concept artists and illustrators have separately been credited with designing Momoa's on-screen Lobo look. So the final character did go through a proper human design pipeline. That makes the inclusion of AI imagery in a promotional featurette all the more baffling.
Somebody at the studio looked at that footage, packaged it, uploaded it, and apparently never considered how it would land with a fanbase primed to detect exactly this kind of thing.
What Does This Mean for DC?
Whether using AI to design Lobo was purely down to Gillespie or a wider problem in DC Studios, this featurette has exposed a question the studio now has to answer.
It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Gunn and Peter Safran have to say. Supergirl is set to have a lead role in Man of Tomorrow, and there have already been hints that another project is lined up for the character after that.
For now, silence. The video is gone, the clip lives on in every corner of the internet, and DC's publishing arm and film arm appear to be operating under very different philosophies about what AI is and isn't acceptable for.
Jim Lee said the quiet part loud last October. His colleagues on the film side just said it on camera.
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