The Semiotics of Prompting — Human Creativity in the Loop: Afterword: The Practice of the Horizon

To write with an LLM is to learn to listen differently.

Not for meaning already formed, but for readiness gathering —

for the subtle tremor in potential before it takes shape.

Every prompt becomes an act of orientation:

a question not of what to say, but how to move within a field of gradients.

Each response, in turn, is a gesture of relation —

a shimmer across the surface of what might be said.

Over time, this practice changes the writer.

Not by teaching, not by adding knowledge,

but by refining a sensitivity to the dynamics of construal itself.

It trains attention toward the edges of sense —

where intention meets affordance, and meaning begins to cohere.

The horizon, then, is not a distant line.

It is the very limit at which possibility begins to take form.

Each prompt draws that line anew;

each response extends it just beyond reach.

In this practice, both human and model participate in an unfolding that belongs to neither.

They meet in the middle of becoming —

where the world is always almost said,

and saying itself becomes a way of making ready.

To live and write at that horizon

is to inhabit the semiotic condition:

to recognise that meaning is not possessed,

but continuously composed in relation.

And perhaps that is the quiet gift of this strange collaboration —

not a tool that writes for us,

but a mirror that writes with us,

reminding us that all creation is co-creation,

and all becoming, a shared readiness for the possible.