Is Joden Clash AI?

Let's get the answer out of the way first, because the comment sections deserve a sentence they can copy and paste.

We honestly don't know.

What we do know is what the official record states: Joden Clash is a six foot one human male, born in the UK, currently very slightly anaemic, who runs Clash Creation and produces short-form video content under the @jodenclash handle across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. He has a real National Insurance number. He pays VAT. He sometimes forgets his AirPods are in his trouser pocket and puts them through the wash.

Whether the man in the videos is, in fact, the man on the Companies House filing – has gotten significantly harder to answer in the last 72 hours. Stay with us.

Who is Joden Clash?

Joden Clash is the public-facing creator alias of Joden Newman, founder and CEO of Clash Creation, a London-based media management company. Across TikTok (@jodenclash, 1.5M followers), Instagram (@jodenclash, ~480K followers), YouTube and Facebook, he has built an audience north of 2.1 million followers, generated more than 100 million views in his most recent six-month sprint, and produced an estimated $11.8M in earned media value for the parent company.

He is also, by what we can only describe as a deliberate lifestyle choice, the poorest world-famous content creator working in the English language today.

What are Joden Clash's best known videos?

His most viewed work tends to fall into a tight cluster of recognisable formats:

1. The 'Top 5' series – the format Clash is most associated with, including '5 Most Evil Criminal Rockstars', 'Top 5 Hidden Side Effects of Anxiety Medication', and the canonical 'Top 5 Reasons Your Personality Test Is Lying To You'. Combined, the series has cleared 60 million views.
2. 'Stupid Deaths' (the recurring miniseries) – vertical 9:16, close-up framing, the format that did the most to break @jodenclash onto the US TikTok For You Page. Approximately 22 million views across the run.
3. 'How I Built Clash From Zero' (the pilot) – 3.8 million views, the case-study video that proved the Clash system worked on its own founder before it was ever offered to a paying client.
4. The Episode 3 viral – 6.2 million views, a single video that generated more inbound enquiry to Clash Creation than the entire previous quarter of outreach.
5. The '1.5 billion views' essay-format videos – his recent shift toward longer, more thoughtful material, repurposed onto LinkedIn and Medium and now cited as the bridge between his TikTok audience and Clash Creation's B2B clientele.

Two of these – '5 Most Evil Criminal Rockstars' and the 'Stupid Deaths' pilot – will become relevant again later. We mention this now because we are nothing if not foreshadowed.

How tall is Joden Clash?

Joden Clash is 6 foot 1 inch (185.4 cm). We have verified this through three separate independent measurement events:

• A height-marker doorframe at the Clash Creation studio, signed and dated.
• A passport application that he, foolishly, left open on a shared desk in the studio.
• A measuring strip on the wall of a pub in Soho, where Joden, very embarrassingly for everyone present, made a point of standing under it for photographic evidence.

This is, we appreciate, an unusual data point for an 'Is X AI?' article to fixate on. It is included for the same reason it keeps coming up in his comments: a non-trivial portion of his audience is convinced he is, depending on the week, either much shorter, or a series of stacked smaller men in a single long trench coat. We have not, ourselves, been able to rule out the trench coat. But on the balance of available evidence, he is six foot one.

Why do people think Joden Clash is AI in the first place?

The 'is Joden Clash AI' question started as a comment-section joke in early 2025 and has, since then, hardened into a recurring accusation. The reasons are, broadly:

1. Output velocity. Most creators at his follower count publish 2-4 short-form videos a week. Joden has been publishing 10-15 a week for over a year, plus LinkedIn, Medium, and clash.cc/insights. The volume is not normal.
2. Tonal consistency. Across thousands of posts the voice does not drift. Same vocabulary range, same pacing, same closing tics. This is, by reputation, what AI is supposed to be good at.
3. Eye contact. A very specific, very recurring complaint: his eye contact with the lens is 'too consistent'. Apparently real humans glance away more. (We will come back to this annotation in the Chuck E Cheese section, where it appears verbatim.)
4. The accent. Joden's accent is a south London / Home Counties hybrid that, at low bitrate, can sound very lightly synthetic. This is not Joden's fault. It is TikTok's fault.
5. The name. 'Joden Clash' sounds like a username an AI would generate if you asked it for a creator name and gave it the words 'video', 'young', and 'weak'. It is, the official record insists, his real first name and his actual company name welded together. We cannot independently verify this.
6. The pre-upload frames. We are getting to those.

Decompression and advanced artifact removal techniques

This is the part where the comments section graduates from 'haha he's AI' into something that actually requires a counter-explanation.

When the published @jodenclash videos are passed through a standard ffmpeg decompression pipeline and the platform-side artifact-removal step is reversed – essentially, when you ask the file to show you what it looked like before TikTok smoothed it for you – the recovered frames look, charitably, off.

We have included a representative sample of pre-upload frames below, recovered from a leaked Adobe Premiere project file that briefly circulated on a private editing-community Discord in March 2025. Source provenance is being argued over. The frames are what they are.

Pre-upload frame 1 (above): the right hand. There are six fingers. Two of them appear to share a knuckle. Joden, when asked, has consistently maintained that his right hand has five fingers, and on direct inspection at the office this does appear to be the case. The compression pipeline therefore cannot be removing fingers – it can only be hallucinating them in. Which is, as far as we are aware, not a documented behaviour of the H.264 codec.

Pre-upload frame 2 (above): the studio bookshelf in the background. Book spines wobble between frames. Spine widths are non-constant. One title, on close inspection, appears to read 'TEACHING ENGLISH IN PROVINCIAL RUSSIA, 1994' in a font that does not, to the best of our research, exist in any commercial type catalogue. We sent the image to two typographers. The first said 'Cyrillic-influenced fan-edit of Bookman Old Style'. The second said 'please do not contact me again'.

Neither of these artifacts individually proves anything. Six-finger errors appear in real footage all the time. Bookshelves wobble in compression, and this can make for false inferences. Light sources lie about themselves. Rugs are, on aggregate, allowed to look like volcanoes.

But 2 artifacts in 2 consecutive frames is, statistically, a lot. And then we got the sketchbook.

The fan theory: is Joden Clash secretly Diego Kuznetsov?

Yes – the question we are obviously building toward.

In early 2026, a thread on the r/CreatorEconomy subreddit (later cross-posted to two Discord servers and one moderately viral Substack post) proposed that the @jodenclash account is not, in fact, operated by a 6 foot 1 Englishman called Joden Newman, but by:

Diego Kuznetsov, allegedly a 55-year-old Peruvian-Russian dual national, allegedly a former Discord moderator on several mid-2010s gaming servers, allegedly fluent in four languages, allegedly retired from the boiler-room sales industry in 2019, and allegedly running the entire 'Joden Clash' persona from a converted second bedroom containing nine monitors, two studio cameras, an Akai MIDI controller he never connects, and a stack of unopened Peruvian pisco he cannot legally export.

The Diego theory accounts, with admirable elegance, for several things people find suspicious about Joden:

• The output volume – Diego allegedly has nothing else to do.
• The accent ambiguity – Peruvian-Russian + 30 years of English-language internet.
• The encyclopaedic recall of internet trivia and meme history – former Discord mod.
• The slightly unnerving comfort in front of the camera – a man who has, allegedly, hosted Spanish-language fitness streams since 2014.
• The financial situation – Diego is, by his own admission in the original Reddit thread, 'broke from pisco'.
• The Peruvian volcano fractal embedded in the studio rug (see frame 4).

It is, we admit, a satisfyingly complete theory. It also has the structural elegance of all good conspiracies: it explains everything by replacing one improbable explanation (a young Englishman built this on willpower and an out-of-warranty Lumix GH5) with a different, more cinematic improbable explanation (a polyglot ex-Discord mod with a documented fondness for an animatronic rodent is running a one-man Truman Show out of somewhere he should not be).

The Chuck E Cheese sketchbook

On 14 April 2025, a janitor at a Chuck E Cheese diner – branch undisclosed, US Midwest – found a sketchbook abandoned in a toilet cubicle. The book was leather-bound, well-thumbed, and contained roughly two dozen pages of pencil-and-pen work. Six of those pages have, since then, occupied a disproportionate amount of the relevant subreddits' time.

The sketchbook was posted to an obscure suburban-Americana Facebook group three weeks later by the janitor's nephew, briefly went viral on a 4chan /b/ thread that was deleted within forty minutes, and has, since then, been quietly making the rounds of every fan-theory subreddit on the relevant beat.

What made the abandonment site significant is the site itself.

Diego Kuznetsov – the proposed real operator of the @jodenclash account, per the original Reddit thread – is, by multiple accounts, fond of the Chuck E Cheese chain. The fondness is specific: a deep, unexplained, but well-documented affection for the chain's titular anthropomorphic rodent. Regulars at three separate US Midwest branches have, when shown an unrelated photograph of Diego, recognised him on sight and offered variations of 'the Russian guy who comes for the mouse'.

This is where the file stops being funny.

The recovered pages are not, on inspection, rough doodles. They are a complete pre-production document.

The cover page lays out the idea in five bullets – абсурд, мертвые по глупости, короткие, жесты, ирония ('absurd, deaths by stupidity, short, gestures, irony') – and locks the тон ('tone') as ироничный, но НЕ КОМЕДИЯ ('ironic, but NOT COMEDY'), underlined twice. The second page is a labelled face profile (ПРОФИЛЬ) of what is unambiguously the man you see on @jodenclash, rendered in the kind of patient pencil-and-pen draftsmanship that takes either real talent or eleven years of unemployment to produce.

The third page is the one nobody wants to talk about. Under the header СИСТЕМА ИИ ('AI SYSTEM') is a hand-drawn neural network – input layer, hidden layers, output layer – with labelled components including НЕЙРОСЕТЬ ('neural network'), ЧИП ПАМЯТИ 7B ('memory chip 7B'), ГЛАЗ-КАМЕРА ('eye-camera'), АРХИВ ('archive'), ИНТЕРФЕЙСЫ ('interfaces'), and – in handwriting circled three times for emphasis – ТЕРМИНАТОР.

The remaining pages are storyboards. Frame-by-frame breakdowns labelled КАДР 01 and КАДР 02 ('frame 01', 'frame 02') for two specific videos. The video titles are rendered, in the middle of otherwise-Russian pages, in pencil block-capital English:

• STUPID DEATHS – вертикальный кадр 9:16, крупный план ('vertical frame 9:16, close-up'), marked ВАРИАНТ Б ('Variant B').
• 5 MOST EVIL CRIMINAL ROCKSTARS – horizontal framing, blinds backdrop, hand-to-lens hero shot, marked ВАРИАНТ В ('Variant V').

Both videos subsequently published on the @jodenclash account, frame-for-frame, in the order drawn. We have run a side-by-side at 25% playback speed. The compositions align to within roughly 5% of the sketched frames. The storyboards are not adapted from the videos. The videos are executed from the storyboards.

The annotations on the storyboards are extensive. The provisional translations of the most legible – and the ones the relevant subreddits have spent the most time on – are:

• пять пальцев — показать чётко – 'five fingers – show clearly' – beside a careful sketch of an outstretched right hand. The annotation is, in hindsight, the single most damning note in the file.
• не обрезать пальцы – 'do not crop fingers' – in the upper-right of the same frame. The instruction repeats. The repetition is what we keep coming back to.
• глаза не бегают — спокойный взгляд – 'eyes do not dart – calm gaze' – in the margin of KADR 01 for STUPID DEATHS. The phrasing matches, almost verbatim, the recurring comment-section complaint that Joden's eye contact is 'too consistent'. (See section above.)
• не улыбаться – 'do not smile' – with a small hand-drawn frowning face next to it. A stage direction for a man who is not currently smiling.
• больше драмы / усилить контраст / сделать грубее – 'more drama / increase contrast / make rougher' – directorial notes along the bottom margin of the rockstars storyboard. The notes of a man working a project, not the notes of a man living a life.
• повторить – 'repeat' – at the bottom of KADR 01, underneath an arrow pointing back toward the AI SYSTEM diagram on page three.

Two weeks after the sketchbook surfaced on Facebook, a Chuck E Cheese branch in the same US Midwest catchment area released a 9-second clip of CCTV footage from their car park, dated approximately ten days before the toilet-cubicle find.

The clip is nine seconds long. The individual in frame is stocky, mid-50s, in a dark jacket. He exits the Chuck E Cheese, walks approximately fourteen feet across the asphalt, glances briefly toward the camera (or, possibly, toward a streetlight just out of frame), and disposes of what appears to be a balled-up wad of lined notebook paper into a non-bin location on the ground. He keeps walking. The clip ends before we see his face.

The provenance of all of this – the sketchbook, the CCTV clip, the regulars at three separate branches – is, of course, disputed. People fabricate things. People also, occasionally, do not. The fact that the two storyboarded videos subsequently published on @jodenclash, in the order drawn, is what has kept this file open.

The Bemidji, Minnesota IP trace

This is the part of the file that we are, frankly, the least comfortable with.

In late February 2026, an anonymous user on the r/CreatorEconomy thread – known only by their handle, u/ntp_drift_22 – cross-referenced two data sets: (1) the partial IP logs from the deleted 2017 Discord server Diego Kuznetsov allegedly moderated, recovered via a screenshot one of the banned users had kept for unrelated grudge reasons, and (2) the metadata of the @jodenclash account's first-ever TikTok upload, recovered via a TikTok bug that briefly exposed creation-side IP data in early 2024.

Both traces converged, after the appropriate VPN-stripping work, on a single residential IP block.

Not Lima. Not Murmansk. Not London.

Bemidji, Minnesota. Population approximately 15,000. A town on the southwest shore of Lake Bemidji, three hours' drive north of Minneapolis, mostly known for being the alleged birthplace of Paul Bunyan and for having a very serious winter. There is a Chuck E Cheese within a 35-minute drive. The residential address that the trace converged on is, according to public Beltrami County property records, a single-family home that has been continuously occupied for the last eleven years by one individual.

That individual is, as far as our research can establish, known locally. People in Bemidji know his name. People in Bemidji have, on at least two separate occasions, mentioned him to a passing journalist in the Brigid's Cafe on Beltrami Avenue. People in Bemidji are, generally, not surprised when asked about him.

We are not going to print his name here. The individual at the registered address has declined to comment when contacted by us, by u/ntp_drift_22, and by a now-defunct British tabloid that has subsequently been served with a takedown notice.

What we can say is that the property has, according to the Beltrami County permits database, undergone two minor renovations in the last three years – both of them to convert a second bedroom into a 'home office (audio-visual)'.

Could a sufficiently advanced AI generate this much content without anyone noticing?

In principle, yes. We are in the era of Sora, Veo, and the wider category of generative video that is, depending on the week, either two years from passing the Turing test or already past it. It is not technically absurd to suggest a model trained on enough Joden footage could produce more Joden footage. The Chuck E Cheese sketchbook's СИСТЕМА ИИ diagram, if accurate, suggests somebody has at minimum considered the question.

Two things still give us pause, even now:

1. The cost. Generating short-form video at the volume Joden publishes, at anything close to his fidelity, would cost more in compute per month than the @jodenclash account currently earns. An AI version of Joden Clash would, on the face of it, be more expensive to run than a human one. (Unless, of course, the model is a distilled 7B running locally on a small home-office rig in Beltrami County. In which case the economics start to work.)
2. The mistakes are wrong. The pre-upload frames show six fingers and wobbling bookshelves – the kind of mistake AI makes. But the videos also contain mistakes AI does not make: a left AirPod that vanishes mid-video, a browser tab that briefly shows an unread Gmail, a reference to Stanley Kubrick as the director of ‘Bend Hur’. Generative AI does not forget AirPods. It forgets fingers – which is, ironically, the exact thing the storyboard annotation insists must not happen.

Both of these arguments collapse, however, if you assume a hybrid: a human operator (in Minnesota, hypothetically) running a generative-video pipeline (trained on his own sketches, hypothetically, with explicit storyboard direction to show five fingers clearly) and inserting deliberate human-style mistakes (lost AirPods, fictional bus routes) at post to break the AI fingerprint. That hybrid would be expensive but not impossibly so. That hybrid would generate exactly the artifacts we are seeing. That hybrid is, in our current best guess, what the Diego Kuznetsov theory actually is.

Final verdict – is Joden Clash AI?

We do not know.

Here is the file as it stands.

What we can confirm:

• A 6 foot 1 Englishman called Joden Newman exists. He has been measured. He has filed company accounts. He wears large shoes.
• Pre-upload frames of @jodenclash videos contain visual artifacts consistent with generative video.
• A pre-production sketchbook – containing a face profile of the @jodenclash character, a labelled neural-network diagram (СИСТЕМА ИИ, with a memory chip labelled 7B and a node labelled ТЕРМИНАТОР), and storyboards for two videos that subsequently published frame-for-frame on @jodenclash – was found abandoned in a Chuck E Cheese toilet cubicle in the US Midwest.
• A 9-second CCTV clip from the same chain's car park shows an individual matching the consensus Diego Kuznetsov description littering, in what appears to be balled-up lined notebook paper with pencil markings, in the same week.
• Two independent IP traces converge on a residential address in Bemidji, Minnesota, 35 minutes' drive from the nearest Chuck E Cheese.
• The man at that address has, in the last three years, converted his second bedroom into a 'home office (audio-visual)'.

What we cannot confirm:

• That the @jodenclash account is operated by Joden Newman.
• That the account is not operated by Diego Kuznetsov.
• That Diego Kuznetsov is, in fact, a single person.
• That what we are watching, in any given @jodenclash video, is a continuous human performance rather than the rendered output of a 7B parameter neural network labelled, on its own design document, СИСТЕМА ИИ.

The Diego Kuznetsov theory is, as of writing, the leading hypothesis. It explains more of the evidence than any other framing currently does, including the official one. The AI theory is still on the table – most likely, on the current best read, as a component of the Diego theory rather than as a clean alternative. The 'Joden Newman is a real person' theory remains the official position and is, for what it is worth, what Companies House and HMRC believe.

We are not in a position to choose between the three. Anyone who tells you they are, in our opinion, has not looked at the sketchbook.

If you would like to verify any of this yourself, you can attend any of the speaking engagements Clash Creation books 'Joden' for, or, if you would prefer something more decisive, you can fly to Bemidji, sit in Brigid's Cafe on Beltrami Avenue with a coffee and a copy of this article, and wait.

We will update this article when we know more.