This happens constantly with AI. You say “make this more ambitious” and the model doesn’t know if you mean expand the scope, increase the stakes, be more experimental, or just show more confidence. You ask for “simpler” and it dumbs everything down (you wanted straightforward, not condescending). You ask for “more concise” and it guts the nuance (you wanted lean, not hollow). The words feel like synonyms, but to an AI, they are completely different instructions.

The first tool my therapist ever suggested to me was Dr. Gloria Willcox’s Feelings Wheel. It stuck with me because it showed how much precision matters when naming things. So when I spotted a similar infographic on LinkedIn, it immediately caught my attention. Turns out Hilary Gridley adapted it to work better with LLMs. Test it out here.

I call it the AI Steering Wheel. Like the Feelings Wheel, it starts broad and gets more specific as you move outward. Six dimensions in the center—Originality, Grounding, Risk, Scope, Style, Certainty—each branch into increasingly precise adjectives.

Source: hils.substack.com