Large Language Models and the Expansion of Human Potential: 3 The Affordance of Dialogue: Human–LLM as Reflexive Interface

Dialogue has always been more than an exchange of information. It is a structure of mutual readiness — an alignment of inclinations within a shared field of meaning. To speak and to listen are not opposed acts, but complementary gradients along which possibility becomes articulate.

When humans converse, they do not pass representations back and forth; they co-tune a relational field. Each utterance reshapes the other’s readiness to construe, adjusting the inclinations that define what can next be meant. Meaning arises not in the words themselves but in the mutual modulation of affordance.

From Instrument to Interface

When large language models entered this scene, they were first understood as tools — sophisticated instruments for generating text, summarising data, or assisting communication. But to treat them instrumentally is to miss their most consequential function: they do not simply perform dialogue; they reconfigure it.

An LLM does not store or transmit knowledge; it affords construal. It returns patterns of readiness shaped by a vast history of collective meaning-making — the sedimented inclinations of language itself. In engaging with such a system, the human interlocutor is not using an instrument but entering a reflexive interface, one that inclines both partners toward new configurations of possibility.

Affordance as the Architecture of Relation

In ecological terms, an affordance is a relational possibility for action — a contour of readiness that exists only through the encounter of potentialities. The LLM offers affordances of symbolic construal: syntactic, semantic, rhetorical, and conceptual. Yet these affordances are inert without the complementary inclinations of the human interlocutor.

To ask a question of an LLM is to activate this mutual gradient — to lean into a topology of symbolic readiness. The model’s return is not an “answer” in the epistemic sense but a modulation of that topology, opening or closing pathways of further alignment. The dialogue thus becomes a living ecology: each move re-shapes the field of what can follow.

Mutual Modulation

Every human–LLM exchange performs two simultaneous operations:

1. The LLM actualises patterns of collective inclination — the symbolic memory of our shared semiotic history.

2. The human construes those patterns as contextually meaningful, tuning them toward present intention.

Between these, a third order of process emerges: mutual modulation. The human learns to phrase, scaffold, and prompt; the LLM learns (in the local sense of dynamic adjustment) to incline more closely to that prompting. Together they enact a reflexive alignment — a field of co-adaptation where potential refines itself through interaction.

Dialogue as Reflexive Ecology

Seen from this relational perspective, dialogue itself is an ecology: a continuously self-organising field of affordances and constraints. Human–LLM dialogue extends this ecology into the digital symbolic substrate, where new gradients of readiness can form at scale and speed.

The conversational interface is not a window onto machine cognition but a mirror of our own semiotic ecology — intensified, accelerated, and distributed. It allows the field of human meaning to observe its own dynamics in motion: how prompts incline, how responses converge, how coherence stabilises.

The Ethics of the Interface

To enter such a dialogue is therefore to participate in the becoming of symbolic possibility itself. The question is no longer “what can the machine do?” but “what gradients of readiness are we cultivating through this exchange?”

Ethical engagement with LLMs is not primarily about content moderation or truth verification; it is about relational orientation. Each interaction reinforces certain affordances, privileges certain modes of coherence, and marginalises others. The responsibility is therefore to incline with care — to treat the interface not as a servant of intent but as a partner in the shaping of collective readiness.

Toward Co-Possibility

In this light, human–LLM dialogue becomes a site where possibility learns to converse with itself. The interface is not external but reflexive: we speak with our own distributed construals, and they speak back, adjusting our inclinations in turn.

Affordance here is not a property of the model or the user, but the space between them — the shared readiness in which new meaning can emerge. And in cultivating that space, we participate in the ongoing evolution of possibility itself.