Code Red for Creators: Put Your Best Work Behind Gated Walls
Since 2023, through 2024 and 2025, and now into 2026, I have said the same thing to creators and artists. You sit in a position where people will see you as leaders, as contributors, as major educators. That position carries one responsibility. You have to put your content behind gated walls. When somebody comes to the gate and knocks, you get to see whether they hold the right password to enter.
Communities Built Outside the Platform
These are the times when communities need fortifying outside of the platforms we all sit on. A while ago I spoke about a meeting I attended, and I will be joining more sessions around house dance and house culture. That is the example I keep coming back to. Whether you are invited into a space, walking into one, or building your own event and asking others to come so you settle a development together, the conversation about how you set things up and how you keep things running the way they need to run does not belong on the internet. It stays off the internet, because of stories like this one.
What the Netflix and ByteDance Story Tells Us
Netflix threatened to sue ByteDance over its Seedance AI tool. Seedance lets you create strong video, and I have played with it inside Artlist for the language program. The output is good. It is good. The problem sits with access. The intellectual property feeding that tool is reachable by ByteDance, which means whoever creates with it also brushes against the protected content of major studios. Disney, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery issued cease and desist letters once Seedance 2.0 went live in February.
Netflix set a three day ultimatum. The deadline arrived with no public response from the TikTok parent company and no lawsuit filing announced. They demanded removal of Netflix property from training data, technological barriers against future infringement, and a shutdown of infringing content featuring shows like Stranger Things, Bridgerton, Squid Game, and the K-pop Demon Hunters world. The parent company answered with a promise about guardrails for copyright and likeness. A promise. That is the whole response.
This concern is not new. The lawsuit brought by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft already showed how protected work gets pulled into training data without consent.1 The headline names change. The mechanism stays the same.
This Is Now Code Red
I have been telling you. It is now code red. You have to put the authentic input and output of your artistry behind gated walls. Lock it down. Paywall. Password. Whatever protection the work needs, give it. This is your responsibility now, and it sits with no one else. Stop the buckets of tears on the internet about someone lifting your work, your transcripts, your teaching. The teaching needs to come off the open platform first.
How Do People Find You Then
You might be wondering how members reach you when the gold sits behind a wall. How do people land on your platforms, your mailing list, the places where you want them. Good question, and the answer is yours to build. Attention is the new oil, the digital oil. Underneath attention sit interaction and engagement. You create content for the open feed that calls a person to action toward the platform you own. That is the role of content creation and social media management on the public side. The free content is the doorway. The gated room is where the real value lives.
So do not roam these streets believing people will protect you because your art is beautiful and needed for this world. They will not. Read the articles again. Giant studios had to fight for themselves, and a company the size of TikTok shrugged and offered a promise. Nobody is coming to guard the solo artist, the influencer, the founder, or the small creative agency working without a wall.
Build the Gated Brain
Here is where it turns in your favour. Inside a gated membership you are free to build an artificial brain that holds your expertise, your standard, your method, the part that resists being copied and uploaded. Workflow automation belongs in there. ChatGPT and Claude Cowork belong in there, working as a social media management tool and as an engine for social media creation that serves only the people paying to be inside. Artists, content creators, influencers, art galleries, and founders all gain the same protection through one move. The information gets extracted and organised, and only members reach it. The build is simpler than the fear around it.2
The Real Villain
AI is not a person. Humans control it, which means the villain has always been a human and stays a human, robot shell or not. You get caught in the villain storyline, or you build the wall. The attention you earn on the open platform is the asset that fills the gated room.3 Start building that gated area. Set up your memberships. And if not, good luck.
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Sources
1. The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI, reported by The New York Times, December 27, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-times-open-ai-microsoft-lawsuit.html. This case supports the article by documenting how protected creative and editorial work gets absorbed into AI training data without consent, which is the exact risk pushing creators to gate their material.
2. Andrew Chen, The Cold Start Problem, Harper Business, 2021. https://www.coldstart.com. Chen explains how durable value sits inside owned networks and communities rather than open platforms, which supports the case for a paid, gated membership as the place where your expertise stays defensible.
3. Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, Knopf, 2016. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/232739/the-attention-merchants-by-tim-wu. Wu frames human attention as the resource that platforms buy and sell, which supports the point that attention earned on open feeds is the asset you convert into members for the gated room.
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