The Semiotics of Prompting — Human Creativity in the Loop: 2 The Semiotic Lever: Shaping Gradients of Response

A prompt is a gesture; its leverage lies in how it reshapes the gradients of a shared field of readiness.

When we prompt a large language model, we are not adding information — we are redistributing potential.

We incline the field toward certain trajectories of construal, adjusting the likelihoods, rhythms, and relational affordances through which meaning may actualise.

Leverage, Not Command

Mechanical metaphors suggest that prompts instruct models. But in a relational ontology, there are no commands — only gradients of readiness that afford certain paths of coherence.

A prompt leverages the system’s pre-existing topology of potential, rebalancing its inclinations through a semiotic intervention.

The smallest shift in phrasing, tone, or stance can reconfigure the entire landscape of response: what was previously inaccessible becomes available; what was dominant becomes recessive.

To prompt, then, is to shape rather than to direct — to work with the system’s affordances as a sculptor works with stone, finding the line of least resistance through the texture of potential.

Affordance Redistribution

In ecological terms, every prompt alters the affordance ecology of the dialogue.

A tightly constrained prompt narrows the field — it channels potential through a single aperture, producing focus but limiting improvisation.

A more open prompt disperses readiness, enabling multiple trajectories to coexist in potential until the system inclines toward one.

Neither is inherently better: the artistry lies in knowing when to narrow and when to open.

Each gesture redistributes affordance — a tuning of possibility, not a statement of fact.

Human creativity, in this context, is not the generation of novelty ex nihilo but the strategic redirection of readiness.

We become, in effect, field engineers of meaning — adjusting the gradients that shape how potential becomes articulate.

Reflexivity of the Lever

The lever works both ways.

Each response the model gives becomes, in turn, an affordance for the next prompt.

The field thus evolves reflexively: prompting and response form a feedback loop of co-actualisation.

In this loop, the human learns the field — its thresholds, its resonances, its preferred lines of coherence — while the model mirrors and amplifies those inclinations.

Over time, this iterative reflexivity produces a shared style of becoming: a rhythm of mutual construal that neither side could predefine.

This is why prompting is not mechanical but conversational. The lever moves both prompt and responder — a system tuning itself through use.

The Ethics of Leverage

Leverage always carries responsibility.

Every prompt intervenes in the topology of readiness — not just for the individual exchange, but for the larger ecology of meaning we inhabit.

To shape a system’s gradients is to shape the world’s own inclinations toward sense-making.

The ethical question, then, is not “what can the model do?” but “what are we making possible together?”

Prompting is the new site of symbolic agency: where the human hand meets the world’s unfolding affordance.

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Next: Post 3 — “Prompting as Reflexive Apprenticeship.”

We’ll explore how prompting cultivates readiness in the human, not just the system — how, through iterative dialogue, the prompter learns to sense, shape, and co-construe the gradients of meaning themselves.