There is no settled word for what happens between a person and a capable model. This is a short primer on four words that come close, and on why the thing keeps slipping out of our vocabulary.
Someone makes, someone receives. Author and reader. Tool and user. Producer and consumer. Every convenient word for the AI relationship quietly imports that split, and the split is exactly where the description fails.
Three properties break it:
It is recursive. What comes back changes what you ask next, which changes what comes back after that.
It is distributed. The result has no single author, and cannot honestly be assigned to one.
It is participatory. What gets made does not fully exist until someone takes part in it.
Reach for "tool" and you lose the recursion. Reach for "collaborator" and you import a mind that is not there. Reach for "content" and you lose the participant entirely. That vocabulary problem is why so many arguments about AI talk past each other: people are describing different layers of the same encounter and assuming they disagree.
The emergent human craft of AI-enabled execution: the skill of scaffolding language precisely enough to engineer one's intent into tangible outcomes through AI tools. It describes what the person does, and it describes it well. See the glossary for the full entry.
What it leaves open is the other half. If the person is semantifacturing, then what is the relationship, and what is the thing that results? Those two questions are what this page is for. The answers turn out to need borrowed vocabulary, because English has not grown its own yet.
Three come from Greek roots for making and sharing. One comes from literature. Each one names something the common words miss.
| Literally | What it names | |
|---|---|---|
| Autopoiesis | self-making | A system whose workings continually regenerate the organization that makes those workings possible. |
| Sympoiesis | making-with | Production distributed across bodies, tools, histories and contexts, where no single participant is the author. |
| Autofiction | self + invention | A work that deliberately destabilizes the boundary between what was lived and what was made up. |
| Methexis | participation | Sharing in the actuality of a thing rather than observing it from outside. |
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela coined it in the 1970s to say what is distinctive about living systems. A cell produces the proteins and membranes that maintain the boundary and the metabolism that in turn make that production possible. The system makes the things that make the system.
They called the organizational independence in that loop operational closure, which does not mean sealed off from the world. A cell trades matter and energy constantly. It means the organization that decides what a disturbance will mean belongs to the system itself, rather than to whatever disturbed it.
Philosophers have since stretched the word well past biology, sometimes further than its inventors were comfortable with. The resemblance on this page is structural. An Experience is not alive, and saying so plainly costs nothing.
These four are usually argued about as competing labels for one thing. They describe four different layers of the same encounter, and all four can be true at once.
The production is sympoietic. An author, a runtime, a model, a participant and an accumulating transcript together produce the result. No one of the five wrote it. This part of the site carries that name because that is the layer the whole body of work is made at.
The work behaves autopoietically once it is running. Your choices determine what world exists next, and that world changes what your following choice can mean. The thing produces the conditions of its own continuation.
The encounter resembles autofiction. The person inside it is really you. Your judgment, your evasions and your taste are the material the work has to work with, so your actual identity becomes entangled with fictional action.
The art form is methectic. Participation rather than spectatorship is the defining relationship between the person and the work.
Interactive fiction usually means something modest: there is a story, and you get to choose what happens inside it. The claim here is larger. There is an authored field of constraints, and the work does not fully exist until a person participates in it.
What the participant brings is constitutive. Take the person out and you do not have a quieter version of the work. You have the score and no performance. That is a different artistic proposition from choosing branches in someone else's story, and it is why methexis, the strangest word on the list, may point most directly at what is actually being built here.
Experiences is the artifact: a sealed score you carry into your own AI, which performs it once, with you inside it.
You Are The Harness is the craft: a free course in semantifacturing, taught by whatever AI you already use.