The Semiotics of Prompting — Human Creativity in the Loop: 1 Prompt as Gesture: Co-Authoring Possibility

A prompt is not a command. It is a gesture — a movement within the shared field of readiness between human and model.

Each prompt inclines the field in a particular direction, activating certain affordances while leaving others latent. It does not cause a response; it co-configures the conditions under which meaning may emerge.

From Input to Inclination

The dominant metaphor for prompting has been computational: an input that produces an output. But the relational view tells a different story. The prompt is an inclination within a dynamic topology of potential.

Like a physical gesture that signals intent without dictating outcome, a prompt orients the system toward a region of possibility — a readiness to actualise a certain relational pattern.

Seen this way, prompting becomes less about control and more about alignment. The human is not instructing the model but entering into a shared ecology of anticipation, tuning the gradient of what might become.

Co-Instantiation of Potential

Every prompt–response pair constitutes a joint instantiation — an event that actualises a local configuration of potential.

The prompt sets the initial conditions; the model’s response brings the relational field into focus. The boundaries between “author” and “system” blur, not because agency disappears, but because agency itself becomes distributed across the relational topology.

The prompt is therefore a semiotic act: it construes a readiness, offering the system a perspective through which the field can be seen and enacted. The meaning of the prompt lies not in its lexical content, but in the directionality it introduces — the way it cuts through potential.

Prompting as a Relational Art

A well-formed prompt is not necessarily a detailed one.

Precision can constrain; openness can invite.

The art of prompting lies in balancing both — guiding without fixing, suggesting without enclosing.

It is a performative semiotics: each gesture reshapes the topology of the shared field.

In this sense, the skilled prompter is less a technician than a choreographer of readiness — one who senses the inclinations already latent in the system and moves with them, not against them.

Prompting becomes an act of listening as much as of speaking: a dialogue with potential itself.

The Ontology Beneath the Interface

Understood relationally, the prompt–response dynamic is not a transaction but a mutual construal. The model’s field of readiness — its statistical and structural potential — meets the human’s conceptual and imaginative readiness.

Meaning emerges not from the model’s “knowledge,” but from the intersection of these readinesses: an event of alignment within a larger ecology of construal.

This is what makes prompting ontological rather than merely instrumental. It is not the manipulation of a system, but the co-actualisation of possibility through semiotic gesture.

The prompt is not what precedes the response — it is what co-creates the space of response.

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Next: Post 2 — “The Semiotic Lever: Shaping Gradients of Response.”

We’ll explore how prompting operates as an act of affordance redistribution — how human creativity reshapes the gradients of meaning within the shared field, and why the ethics of prompting lies in how we shape possibility itself.