Jake Watson
Producer at Corridor Digital & Attorney
Corridor Digital producer-host and licensed California attorney whose viral legal explainer on the Stable Diffusion class action conceded the training data was copyrighted — yet welcomed the fight, calling himself thankful that companies like Stability are “pushing the boundaries” of artistic tools.
In his words
I am thankful that this lawsuit is being brought… I’m also thankful that companies like Stability are pushing the boundaries of what you can do with artistic tools, and I think that this fight will ultimately lead to a better coexistence of both arts and entertainment and computer science well into the future — and that’s good for everybody.
Stability doesn’t deny that huge swaths of the training images are copyrighted, which in the most basic terms is copyright infringement on a mind-bogglingly massive scale.
Biography
Jake Watson is a producer, writer, and on-camera host at Corridor Digital — and, unusually for a YouTube VFX studio, a licensed attorney in the state of California. By his own count he has spent more than a decade “making cutting-edge digital art with Corridor,” appearing across Corridor Crew’s videos and podcast while handling much of the studio’s production side.
The lawyer in the AI art fight
In January 2023, days after artists including Karla Ortiz filed their class action against Stability AI, Watson fronted “Lawyer Explains Stable Diffusion Lawsuit,” a sixteen-minute legal breakdown that outlets like Digital Camera World and TechTimes picked up. He gave both sides their due: the LAION-5B training set was scraped without consent — infringement “on a mind-bogglingly massive scale” in his basic-terms framing — but the real question was fair use, and on that he concluded Stability “does have a very good argument,” because training appears highly transformative under precedents like Authors Guild v. Google.
Perhaps, just maybe, if we can separate our emotions from it, we might be able to see that this legal fight is exactly what needs to be happening right now.
Watson did not wave away the artists’ stakes — he acknowledged “a world where people are less inclined to desire the art of the artists” whose work sits in training sets, and insisted the value of that data be recognized: “crap in equals crap out is 100% true here.” But his bottom line was optimistic, and he kept producing at a studio that doubled down on AI filmmaking through the “Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors” controversy and beyond.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/jake-watson