A behind the scenes Supergirl video appears to show its director Craig Gillespie poring over AI concept art. Warner has since pulled the featurette.

This is the kind of publicity that DC Studios’ Supergirl movie could do without. A featurette recently uploaded to YouTube aimed to take viewers behind the scenes on the recent superhero flick – and appeared to show that director Craig Gillespie used generative AI to decide on the look of the character Lobo.

The online response was so angry that Warner Bros has since deleted the video from YouTube.

Clips of the offending moment have still circulated online (IGN has an embed), and appear to imply that AI was used to churn out concept art of Jason Momoa’s leather-clad antihero. Amounting to just four seconds, the footage shows Gillespie and Momoa looking at a laptop screen; on it, there appear to be around a dozen images of the Lobo character which clearly resemble Momoa.

One of those images then appears by itself on the laptop screen, and while we can’t say for certain whether it was generated with AI – it could be a photo digitally manipulated by a human – it certainly has that uncanny, quasi-realistic AI look.

Warner Bros hasn’t yet provided a response to the backlash, so at this stage we can’t know to what extent AI may have been used in Supergirl’s production.

Whatever the truth is, the deleted featurette caps off a bizarre few days for the studio’s marketing department. Earlier this week, Warner decided to promote its new dinosaur action adventure The End Of Oak Street with an AI-generated ‘podcast’ hosted by talking dogs.

Supergirl emerged in cinemas in June, and was such a box office disappointment that DC Studios boss Peter Safran conceded that same month that it hadn’t lived up to expectations. Available digitally now and coming to DVD and Blu-ray in September, this would ordinarily be the period where a film that didn’t land theatrically can begin to find an appreciative audience.

Instead, it’s been slapped – rightly or wrongly – with the increasingly toxic AI label.

We’ll update this piece if Warner Bros comments on the matter.