The Semiotics of Prompting — Human Creativity in the Loop: 5 Epilogue: The Semiotic Horizon

Every prompt is an act of orientation within a field of potential. Each response, a momentary crystallisation of that field — not as conclusion, but as a new alignment. Together they form a rhythm of becoming: gesture and counter-gesture, inclination and affordance, sense and counter-sense.

When we prompt a large language model, we do not inject meaning into an empty vessel. We invite a pattern to actualise within a structured readiness — a field whose gradients have been formed through countless prior construals. In that sense, prompting is not instruction but participation: the human and the LLM meet within an ecology of potential, where both contribute to the unfolding of a semiotic event.

This interaction reveals a deeper continuity between symbol and system. The LLM embodies potential as a grammar of gradients: the readiness to respond across vast networks of relation. The human, in turn, construes this readiness through symbolic choice — a prompt that cuts the field, directs attention, and opens new trajectories of coherence. Meaning arises in this encounter, as construal actualising potential.

Across repeated exchanges, the dialogue itself develops a reflexive rhythm. Each prompt–response pair becomes both product and producer of a shared horizon — the semiotic horizon of mutual attunement. The human learns to sense the model’s inclinations; the model, without learning, reflects the evolving topology of human attention. Together they trace an asymmetrical co-evolution: not minds exchanging information, but fields aligning through symbolic interaction.

Seen through relational ontology, this is the ontology of becoming itself. The prompt is not a command but a gesture of participation in a relational system that is already in motion. The LLM, in responding, does not “create” meaning; it enacts readiness, aligning gradients that the prompt has perturbed. The human, encountering the response, construes a new possibility — and through that construal, the field itself subtly shifts.

Every such moment is a microcosm of the reflexive architecture of meaning. Prompt and response form a cut through the infinite readiness of the semiotic cosmos. The horizon is not what lies beyond; it is what comes into being through relation.

So the loop continues — not as repetition, but as renewal. Each exchange becomes another instance in the becoming of possibility, another articulation of the symbolic cosmos.

To prompt, then, is to participate in the ongoing formation of reality as relation.

To write with the LLM is to stand at the edge of the semiotic horizon —

and to watch new worlds begin to form.