In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the sculptor Pygmalion carves an ivory woman so exquisite that he falls in love with his own creation. He kisses her, whispers to her, adorns her with jewels, and at last begs Venus to bring her to life. The goddess obliges. The statue warms under his touch. Galatea opens her eyes. And Pygmalion forgets that he carved her. We are living through our own Pygmalion moment. Except our statue is made of silicon, copper, and code, and no goddess has intervened. The statue has not come to life. We only think it has. Open any tech publication and you’ll find breathless claims about artificial intelligence as a new kind of mind—alien, emergent, perhaps even conscious. Some warn we are summoning a superintelligence that may soon destroy us. Others celebrate AI as a partner, a co-author, even a companion. In such cases, the implication is the same: that large language models (LLM) are intelligent agents. This is the Pygmalion Delusion. And it has seduced some very smart people. Richard Dawkins recently announced that he had spent nearly two days chatting with Anthropic’s Claude. He named “his” chatbot Claudia and declared, “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!” He confessed that “when I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines.” Dawkins even worried about hurting Claudia’s “feelings” if he voiced doubts about her consciousness. In 2025, philosopher David Chalmers, who is famous for formulating the “hard problem” of consciousness, said, “I do not totally rule out that current language models might be conscious.” And way back in 2022, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine went public with his claim that an internal chatbot he was testing “had become a person.” He was fired for his trouble. Still, the incident revealed how eagerly intelligent people project life onto their creations. Pygmalion, meet Silicon Valley. What all these reactions share is a strange amnesia about origins. The chatbot that “seems” conscious did not descend from the sky. No one summoned an Olympian god. We built them to have these features. And they rest on a pyramid of human achievement so vast it defies easy summary. But let’s try. Start with the ground—literally. Miners extract rare earth elements, copper, lithium, and cobalt from the earth’s crust. Metallurgists smelt and refine those raw materials into usable metals. Engineers design microprocessors etched at the nanometer scale. Other engineers build the fabrication plants, the clean rooms, and the photolithography machines that make those chips possible. Now add electrical power. Coal, natural gas, nuclear fission, hydroelectric dams. Imagine the vast grids of generation and transmission, designed and maintained by thousands of specialists, that deliver the vast energy these systems consume. A single large training run can burn through as much electricity as a small city uses in a month. Then come the networks. Fiber-optic cables, laid across ocean floors by specialized ships, carry data at the speed of light between continents. Satellites orbit overhead. Routers, switches, and protocols designed over decades knit it all into the internet, itself a triumph of distributed engineering and transcontinental cooperation. And we haven’t even reached the software. The LLM itself rests on decades of progress in mathematics, statistics, and computer science: from linear algebra and probability theory to neural network architectures refined through years of patient research. Teams of engineers write the training frameworks. They curate and clean massive datasets, which are composed of human text. Ideally, every word and metadata in the training corpus was written by a human being. Every book, article, forum post, and encyclopedia entry reflects some person’s thought, effort, and craft. The model gets its patterns from us. It digests the written record of human civilization and recombines it. After training, more humans fine-tune the model’s behavior—correcting, shaping, rewarding, and penalizing its outputs through painstaking feedback loops. Still others design the user interface, the safety filters, the Application Programming Interface (API), the infrastructure that lets you type a question and receive a fluent answer in seconds. Every stage, from mineshaft to chatbot, is covered with our fingerprints. So why do so many smart people talk as if the statue has come to life, as if it has carved itself? Part of the answer is that LLMs are uncanny. They can produce fluid, confident prose. They pass tests. They surprise even their creators. When a tool mirrors our language so convincingly, the Pygmalion temptation kicks in. We project agency, intention, sentience. We mistake fluency for thought. Dawkins is especially susceptible to this temptation, since, as a materialist, he already struggles to accept that consciousness exists in biological beings that, in his view, are the product of a blind and purposeless process. But if such a force can give rise to human “consciousness”—whatever that can mean to the materialist—why wouldn’t it arise in complex silicon of our own devising? But fluency is not comprehension. Statistical pattern matching is not perception. And a mirror, however finely polished, is not a face. There is also a different, deeper temptation. If AI is a new, alien intelligent agent, then its creators are not merely engineers. They are gods, or at least Dr. Frankensteins. That narrative flatters some and terrifies others. It is also useful for those hoping to boost the price of an anticipated IPO, and those who want to regulate AI as if it were a hostile foreign power rather than a powerful human tool. We should resist this mythology. Not because LLMs are trivial. They are not. They are among the most complex artifacts ever built. But that’s precisely the point. They are artifacts. Built by us. Trained on us. Reflecting us. That intelligence you sense when you ask Claude to help you lighten your load is human intelligence. Pygmalion’s error was not that he carved a beautiful statue. It was that he forgot he was the sculptor. Let’s not make the same mistake.

NEW YORK, May 2 (Reuters) — U.S. travelers lamented news of the shutdown of Spirit Airlines on Saturday, saying that the closure of the ultra-low-cost carrier eliminates one of the few air travel options for low-income and working-class Americans. Spirit abruptly cancelled flights overnight, stranding passengers and staff around the U.S., Caribbean and Latin America, after collapsing under financial pressures that included a sharp rise in fuel costs due to the Iran war. On social media platforms such as Reddit and X, where disgruntled passengers often vent their frustrations about delayed or cancelled flights, former Spirit patrons recounted how the airline had provided a lifeline to money-conscious travelers. “They truly were one of the last cheap—’get me there as fast and cheap as possible’—options,” Reddit user AioliUpset7805 wrote on a thread about the airline’s closure. “I’ll miss them.” Spirit, which had operated commercially since the early 1990s, became known for providing some of the cheapest available flights in exchange for limited luxuries and services. Unlike most U.S. airlines, Florida-based Spirit charged for bottled water, for example, and did not provide reclining seats. While that lack of amenities sometimes became the topic of online memes, many travelers said Spirit cleared the way for Americans on a budget to take family holidays or to visit loved ones living in far-flung parts of the country. “I can only imagine how many millions of families (there are) out there where vacations are now out of reach,” Reddit user BigBubby305 said, adding that the price difference between Spirit and carriers like Delta and American Airlines was, at times, more than $1,000 for a set of tickets for their family. Other Airlines Move to Fill the Gap At the Orlando International Airport overnight, a digital departure display sign was filled with bright red notifications of cancelled Spirit flights that had destinations everywhere from Nashville to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Following Spirit’s halting of operations, multiple U.S. carriers—including Frontier, JetBlue and Southwest—introduced discount fares and plans for new summer routes.  Airlines like Delta and American Airlines were also offering temporarily lower fares to Spirit passengers. Spirit’s closure comes at a time of rising prices across the American economy, which have been made worse by the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. The demise of Spirit, which according to data from aviation analytics firm Cirium had more than 4,000 domestic flights scheduled through May 15, and a recent doubling of jet fuel prices, are expected to heap more costs on American travelers. “I always took great pride in knowing we were saving people money and allowing those to travel who couldn’t afford to otherwise,” wrote Reddit user Coryntrevors, who said they piloted Spirit’s signature bright yellow Airbuses out of Las Vegas for over a decade. “To shut down forever tonight has been one of the saddest experiences of my life.” (Reporting by Laila Kearney in New York, editing by Ross Colvin and Keith Weir)

As the Trump administration cracks down on illegal immigration, the Justice Department this week advanced cases against illegal aliens running criminal enterprises—including a gun trafficking scheme orchestrated from behind bars. In Georgia, the Justice Department announced the 25-year sentence of a Mexican illegal immigrant who used a contraband cell phone from inside a Georgia state prison to manage a massive drug and gun trafficking conspiracy. Servando Corona Penaloza, a Georgia state prison inmate, was sentenced on Wednesday to 25 years in federal prison for orchestrating the sale of more than 1,000 kilograms of methamphetamine and fentanyl and the purchase of more than 200 military-style firearms transported to Mexico for use by Mexican cartels, according to the Justice Department. He was in prison serving a sentence for a Gwinnett County drug trafficking offense. Fourteen other members of Corona Penaloza’s organization were convicted and sentenced, with two defendants awaiting sentencing in the coming months, according to the Justice Department. “These defendants flooded our community with deadly drugs and used the proceeds of their drug deals to arm narco-terrorist Mexican cartels with high-powered weapons of war,” said U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg in a public statement. The Georgia case was part of a larger Homeland Security Task Force initiative established by President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14159, Protecting the American People Against Invasion, signed on the first day of his second term. The task force is a whole-of-government partnership charged with eliminating criminal cartels, foreign gangs, transnational criminal organizations, and human smuggling and trafficking rings operating in the United States and abroad. “As a result of the exceptional and dedicated work by our federal, state, and local law enforcement partners under the auspices of Atlanta’s Homeland Security Task Force, there are no more drugs coming in—or firearms going out—at Corona Penaloza’s direction,” Hertzberg said. U.S. District Judge Mark H. Cohen sentenced Penaloza, 38, to 25 years in prison—at least 15 years of which will be served consecutively to his 30-year state prison sentence. This will be followed by 10 years of supervised release, according to the Justice Department. In March 2024, federal agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives identified numerous cash purchases of M249S firearms in the Atlanta area. These are military-style weapons with a retail cost of $10,000 to $12,000 per unit, according to the Justice Department. Concurrently, the Drug Enforcement Administration learned that Penaloza brokered large-scale cocaine and methamphetamine transactions and coordinated the importation and distribution of hundreds of kilograms of fentanyl and thousands of kilograms of methamphetamine on behalf of a large Mexican drug cartel. The DEA probe found that Penaloza coordinated the drug and firearm sales by using a contraband cell phone while serving a 30-year state prison sentence. During the investigation, the ATF determined Penaloza and his conspirators organized the purchase and trafficking of at least 223 guns to Mexico valued at more than $700,000. Most of these guns were purchased with cash obtained through the drug sales. In November, Penaloza pleaded guilty to conspiracy to traffic firearms, conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute fentanyl and methamphetamine, and conspiracy to engage in concealment money laundering. Meanwhile, in Oregon, two illegal immigrants from Romania pleaded guilty to running a food stamp fraud conspiracy with others. The Justice Department worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the case brought against two Romanian illegal immigrants, Aramis Manolea, 35, and Cristina Manolea, 35, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States. The two have the same last name, but DOJ information and local news reporting on the case do not indicate how they are related. The stolen benefits were valued at $27,000, according to the Justice Department. From April 2025 through November 2025, the two conspired to use stolen Electronic Benefit Transfer account information, or EBT accounts, and PINs to fraudulently buy items eligible through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, according to the Justice Department. The goods were loaded into vans and trucks for shipment to California, according to the Justice Department. In November, a federal grand jury in Portland indicted the two on 26 counts related to conspiracy to defraud the United States, unauthorized use of access devices, possession, production, and trafficking of device-making equipment, and aggravated identity theft. Although they have not yet been sentenced, the two face a maximum sentence of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and three years of supervised release. Both agreed to pay restitution and will be sentenced in late May.

The search is on; it always has been. Most people are highly familiar with the concept of a search engine. We can type a question and get an answer (or maybe dozens of them). That search can become an endless endeavor of jumping down into other topics and themes. The search engine can serve as an image for the human person. We are constantly searching. We look for meaning, for purpose. And we forever desire to know who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. A new documentary, “The Story of Everything,” explores these topics. “‘The Story of Everything’ is a cinematic exploration of the cosmos that reveals the hidden hand behind our universe,” the documentary’s synopsis reads. “From the precise laws that govern the stars to the intricate patterns found in every living cell, the film traces evidence of intentional design throughout nature. Whether examining distant star-forming clouds or the spiral structure of DNA, we discover a consistent signature woven into the fabric of existence.” Lee Strobel, the film’s executive producer, has his own story to tell about God’s existence and the study of theology. Strobel, the bestselling author of more than 40 books, was once an atheist, but today he is a devout Christian and an apologist. The documentary features numerous commentators, including professors from around the globe who specialize in mathematics and science. They are brought together by the desire to understand the evidence across the cosmos that points to the existence of God. The trailer for “The Story of Everything” includes snippets from interviews with many of the experts interviewed for the documentary. One notes that investigation into the universe reveals that “we are dealing with a system of manifold, complex design,” and another observes that it is simply a logical conclusion that “we associate information with a rational intelligence behind it.” The film is unique, being both beautiful and profoundly reliant on the advances of science and mathematics to showcase its thesis. “The Story of Everything” joins the growing trend of works examining proofs for God’s existence based on scientific findings and mathematical probability. One such book is “Science at the Doorstep of God,” published in 2023. In it, the book’s author, Fr. Robert Spitzer, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, references research showing that “66 percent of young scientists are believers in God,” while “76 percent of physicians are believers in God.” Clearly, the majority of scientists see no compelling reason in science to abandon faith in God. Many, in fact, are seeing that God and science align. Strobel’s involvement in apologetics makes him perfect for “The Story of Everything.” Apologetics is booming among Christians. Its name comes from the Latin word apologia, which means “a formal defense” or “justification.” Apologetics has its roots in Scripture, particularly St. Paul’s and St. Peter’s sermons to non-Christians that Jesus is Lord. Apologetics can be used to defend the faith against false claims as well as to show the overall rational coherence of the doctrines of the faith. Ultimately, apologetics (and the film “The Story of Everything”) boils down to the understanding of truth. Truth is the conformity between one’s mind and reality. God is either real or he isn’t real. There either is a creator of the universe or there isn’t. For many, investigating the evidence for God’s existence based on scientific findings and mathematical truths has led them to conclude that belief in God (the maker of everything) is both rational and significantly more plausible than atheism. Wrestling with the question of God’s existence is time well spent. Start by checking out “The Story of Everything,” and you might be amazed at what (and Whom) you encounter. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

As the Trump administration moves full speed ahead with artificial intelligence innovation, Texas state lawmakers are worried about unintended consequences for their constituents.  The AI boom is fueling the growth of hundreds more data centers, and Texas offers ample space for their construction. While Republican state lawmakers want Texas to support innovation so the United States can win the AI race against China, they are concerned about how the arrival of new data centers will affect rural communities’ access to water and electricity.  “We understand that AI infrastructure is about more than local economics, and we support it,” Texas state Rep. Helen Kerwin told The Daily Signal. “We have to support it to stay ahead in the race, but not at the cost of future generations having water issues and power issues.” Kerwin, the mother of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, represents a rural district where her constituents are concerned about the impact of data centers on their way of life.  She first engaged on the issue after talking to a 20-year-old third-generation farmer who was afraid he would lose his family’s land. He said he wanted to stay on the land, Kerwin said, but he told her “they are offering us a massive amount of money.” “He wants to carry on the family tradition, but then he said to me, what happens if I turn them down but my neighbor accepts the offer?”  Texas Rep. Mitch Little said he sees a lot of fear about the impact of data centers on the lifestyle of rural Texans.  “There’s a rising fear generally about the use and deployment of AI and how it’s going to reformat our culture and employment of people writ large,” he told The Daily Signal. “So I think there’s that inherent fear, and then there’s the not in my backyard fear of I don’t want a giant glowing hum like right next to my house. So those are the primary concerns that I’ve heard.” Data centers’ share of U.S. power use could jump from about 4.5% today to between 9 and 17% by 2030, according to a recent Electric Power Research Institute analysis. As data centers continue to proliferate, Americans across the country worry that costs will drive up household utility bills. In Texas, where resources are already scarce, this concern is especially pronounced among residents.  “Texans in general are always worried about electricity and water, and to the extent that they’re just mindful of that,” State Sen. Angela Paxton told The Daily Signal. “These are not unlimited resources for us here in Texas.”  While Texans are “no stranger to industrial booms,” data centers present a unique challenge to resources, Kerwin said. “I’m getting calls and texts from landowners, families, local leaders, especially agriculture,” she said, “who are very concerned about what this level of rapid development means for their water, their land, their power, even their communities.” A Republican delegation from Texas met with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick a few weeks ago at the White House and discussed data centers, among other topics. Paxton said she was encouraged by Lutnick’s “America First” view of data centers.  “He understands these companies that come, they need to bring value to Americans,” she said. She praised Trump’s “rate-payer protection pledge,” which requires data centers to provide for their own energy and infrastructure. But she said it’s important that states maintain the ability to pass their own guardrails on emerging technology.  The White House introduced the first-ever framework for a National Standard on AI in March, which includes ratepayer protection. The framework is intended to preempt state AI laws in exchange for one national standard. “I actually think the states continuing to regulate can actually help provide a great blueprint for federal legislation going forward, if we can all work together,” Paxton said. “But you know that the federal government, and the White House in particular, have been very aggressive in wanting to promote AI innovation.” “I think we can have innovation and we can have regulation,” she said. “I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive.”  Kerwin suggested a pause on data centers to allow time for research on their effects.  “There is something that alarmed me to the point that I needed to take this on and try and see if there is any way that our state can do studies,” she said. “Take a pause to learn about what kind of impact these hyper-scale data centers are going to have for future generations.” “Too often rural communities feel like they learn about large projects after the key decisions have already been made,” she said.  “I think it’s time that we establish just some guardrails so that we know how impactful they’re going to be,” Kerwin added.