Why Your AI Assistant Should Be Like a Recipe, Not a Restaurant
Ever tried editing a Google Doc with ten other people? Pure chaos. Someone deletes your paragraph, another person overwrites your work, and somehow the formatting implodes. Now imagine that happening to your carefully crafted AI assistant.
This is the sharing dilemma we face as AI personas become more valuable. These aren’t simple chatbots—they’re finely tuned digital personalities with specific expertise and communication styles. People invest hours perfecting them, so naturally they want to share their creations.
But how do you share something so personal without creating a mess?
The Problem with Sharing
Most platforms handle this predictably. Social media keeps everything public but shallow. Enterprise tools create Byzantine permission systems. Gaming platforms either lock everything down or let chaos reign.
For AI personas, these approaches fail spectacularly. A persona perfect for a marketing consultant needs major adjustments to work for a startup founder. The style that works for customer service would be wrong for technical documentation.
Yet the expertise that goes into creating a great persona shouldn’t stay locked away. That marketing consultant’s insights about customer psychology could benefit others—if they could adapt it to their needs.
Enter the Recipe Model
The solution comes from humanity’s oldest sharing tradition: recipes.
Julia Child doesn’t cook in your kitchen every time you want beef bourguignon. She shares the recipe, and you make your own version. You might add more wine, adjust seasonings, or swap ingredients. Your version becomes uniquely yours, but it started with her expertise.
Smart AI persona systems work exactly this way. Instead of shared personas that everyone fights over, they let you copy the original and make it your own.
When someone creates a public persona, they’re publishing a recipe. The original stays theirs—they own it completely and nobody else can mess with it. When you want to use it, you get your own complete copy. It starts identical to theirs, but from that moment forward, it’s entirely yours.
Why Copying Beats Collaboration
This seems wasteful until you see the benefits. No conflicts—you can’t accidentally break someone else’s work. Privacy is automatic—your modifications stay private. The original creator maintains control and reputation.
Most importantly, it enables true experimentation. When you can modify freely without affecting the original, you’re more likely to innovate. Some experiments become breakthroughs that get shared as new public personas.
The Network Effect
This creates something beautiful: a network of related but independent assistants, each optimized for specific needs while sharing DNA from the best originals.
A world-class financial advisor creates a persona that explains complex investments brilliantly. A teacher copies and modifies it for teenagers. A blogger adapts it for engaging content. A retirement planner specializes it for older adults.
Each version gets better at its specific job, but all benefit from the original expertise. The advisor gets recognition, users get perfectly tailored assistants, and collective intelligence grows.
What This Means
Whether creating or using AI assistants, this model changes everything.
As a creator, you can share expertise widely without losing control. Your knowledge spreads and helps others while your original stays yours.
As a user, you get expert-level starting points you can customize freely. No building from scratch or compromising with conflicting needs.
The Bigger Picture
This copy-rather-than-collaborate approach works for many things beyond AI assistants. Anytime something is both valuable to share and highly personal to use, copying often beats collaboration.
It’s a reminder that not everything needs to be multiplayer. Sometimes the kindest thing is giving someone a great starting point and getting out of their way.
The next time you’re building a platform for personalized content, ask: should this be a restaurant where everyone eats the same thing, or a cookbook where everyone makes their own version?
More often than you think, the cookbook wins.
