Gravity Falls creator on Warner Bros.' AI dog ad: "The first dogs I've ever wanted to euthanize"
Warner Bros. promoted its new movie The End of Oak Street with an AI-generated “dog podcast,” and it backfired hard. Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch’s brutal one-liner went viral, and the studio quietly pulled the clip.
Warner Bros. tried to promote its new dinosaur movie with an AI-generated dog podcast. It went so badly that Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch summed up the internet’s mood in nine words, and the studio deleted the whole thing.
To market The End of Oak Street, the Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor sci-fi film out this week, Warner Bros. partnered with DogPack, a social-media account that makes AI-generated “podcasts” hosted by talking AI dogs. The 90-second clip had two artificial hosts interviewing Starbuck, the real dog from the movie, rendered with the same uncanny AI effects.
Hirsch’s response: “The first dogs I’ve ever wanted to euthanize.”
The backlash was swift
Hirsch, best known for creating Gravity Falls, wasn’t reacting in a vacuum. He was pouring gas on a fire already burning.
His post racked up huge engagement, but the criticism had been building before he weighed in. Reactions across X and Reddit ran from confusion to outright rejection, one widely shared comment asked whether using AI to market the film meant the movie itself was AI, another dismissed it flatly as corporate “AI slop.” A third viewer said the ad had talked them out of seeing a movie they’d been considering.
The response was harsh enough that Warner Bros. appears to have pulled the clip from the film’s official Instagram, though copies keep circulating.
Why it landed so badly
The misfire is instructive, because the studio undercut its own marketing.
Earlier promotion for The End of Oak Street had leaned on Starbuck’s genuine, real-dog charm, character posters, the actual animal performer, the human cast. Then the studio replaced that with uncanny synthetic dogs, trading the real thing audiences liked for a cheap AI gimmick. It’s the specific move that reliably enrages people right now: a billion-dollar company reaching for generative AI to save a few dollars on marketing, in a business built on human creative work.
It also arrives amid a broader, ugly year for AI in entertainment, from YouTube’s detector wrongly flagging hand-drawn animators as “slop” to the constant flood of AI-generated content creators say is drowning them out. A major studio voluntarily embracing AI dogs reads, to that audience, as the industry siding with the thing hurting them.
Why Hirsch’s voice carries here
That it was Hirsch delivering the knockout line matters.
He’s a working animator with a beloved, entirely hand-crafted body of work, exactly the kind of creator whose labor generative AI threatens. When someone who built Gravity Falls by hand says a studio’s AI dogs are the first he’s ever wanted to euthanize, it’s a joke, but it’s a joke with a real position underneath it: that this stuff is bad, cheap, and worth mocking out of existence.
Warner Bros. has had a rough stretch, a merger fight, a historic box-office bomb, and now a self-inflicted AI marketing wound in the same season. The lesson studios keep having to relearn is simple and keeps not sticking: audiences can tell when you’ve replaced something real with something generated, and they don’t like being sold the fake. The dogs are gone from Instagram. The point Hirsch made is still up.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Variety (August 2026), verified for the DogPack partnership, the 90-second clip, the Goldie and Frenchie AI hosts, Starbuck being the real dog rendered with AI effects, the “Ewan McGregor was excellent with treats” line, the film’s cast and J.J. Abrams production, and the mixed Instagram comments
ComicBasics (August 2026), verified for Alex Hirsch’s “first dogs I’ve ever wanted to euthanize” quote, his Gravity Falls background, the Cartoon Base post, the swift-and-negative reaction across Reddit and X, and the earlier Starbuck-focused marketing
Dark Horizons (August 2026), verified for Warner Bros. removing the clip from the film’s official Instagram, DogPack being a Montreal-based AI-content group, and the clip continuing to circulate
Scified (August 2026), verified for the Instagram “AI info” disclosure, the film’s plot and release timing, and the generative-AI-versus-creative-labor framing