From Pygmalion to the Algorithm: The Myth of Artificial Creation in the Age of Simulation

From Pygmalion’s ivory beloved to the Jewish Golem and Mary Shelley’s Promethean Creature, Western culture has long imagined the human as a maker of artificial life, and the made being as a mirror that returns the maker’s gaze with uncanny questions about authorship, agency, and the boundaries of the human. This paper purports to demonstrate that contemporary discourses on artificial intelligence and simulated consciousness do not leave these creation myths behind but instead rewrite them, transposing their core anxieties into the algorithmic substrate of digital culture. Methodologically, the study adopts a comparative mythocritical approach informed by Baudrillard’s theory of simulation and posthumanist criticism, reading three contemporary texts—Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun—against their classical and early modern precursors. The analysis suggests that the mythic structure of artificial creation persists as a hidden grammar shaping how the digital age narrates its own posthuman futures, and that what we call simulation is, in fact, the latest mask worn by an ancient myth in which the creator is always haunted by the autonomy of the created. Thus, the myth itself does not change; it only transforms.