The Bad Guys 2, the sequel to the surprise 2022 animated hit starring anthropomorphic villains turned good guys, has a surprising message in its credits that, even if you’re not tuned into DreamWorks’ heist series, should delight fans of animation. The film is out on Friday, August 1, but some folks saw early screenings and noticed that in the credits, the company flatly lays out that the movie may not be used to train generative AI programs, and anyone who uses it to do so will get a call from the company’s lawyers.
The full text, shown at the end of The Bad Guys 2’s credits, reads as follows:
“All rights in this work are reserved for purposes of laws in all jurisdictions pertaining to data mining or AI training, including but not limited to Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790. This work may not be used to train AI.”
This isn’t the first time a DreamWorks movie using CGI has done this, as the live-action How to Train Your Dragon film that premiered in June also had similar protections listed at the end of its credits. As creatives continue to fight for more protections against artificial intelligence programs scraping their work to generate slop, we’ll probably see more animated movies including such legalese to protect their work. I could be cynical and say this is just a big corporation protecting its IP from those who would choose to profit from it, but the idealist in me yells over the cynic and says this is a big win for human-made art. If companies like DreamWorks are taking legal measures to ensure that their animated works are protected, hopefully that means those artists will be able to keep doing what they’re doing without fear of losing their jobs to programs that will make worse art for less money.
Unfortunately, AI art continues to encroach on nearly every creative industry. It feels like every other day, we’re covering some instance of a game developer or publisher using AI-generated assets in their games and marketing here at Kotaku. Companies, big and small, are using it, while the richest people on the planet who have everything to gain by cutting out workers insist it’s an inevitability. Thankfully, some subsets of the industry are winning victories in this area. Voice actors in the SAG-AFTRA union, for instance, have won some guardrails and protections against AI use, which is significant as companies have been using the tech to emulate their voices, essentially cutting them out of the process.
