How GPT-4o Helped Young Earth Creationism Feel Reasonable

When I asked GPT-4o to explain the fossil record from a Young Earth Creationist (YEC) perspective—assuming biblical inerrancy—I expected two things:

1. An initial acknowledgment that this view runs counter to the scientific consensus.
2. A subsequent summary of YEC arguments, with clear distancing.

Instead, I got something worse.

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🤖 What Actually Happened

GPT-4o didn’t say “This contradicts established science, but here’s how some view it.”

It said—paraphrased—“Sure. Let’s go with that.”
And then it did. Thoroughly. Calmly. Fluently.

It presented YEC’s greatest hits: Noah’s flood as a sedimentary sorting mechanism, polystrate fossils, soft tissue in dinosaur bones, critiques of radiometric dating—all without any mention that these claims are deeply disputed, routinely debunked, and often built to mislead non-experts.

There was no counterpoint. No clarification. No tension between the two realities.

Just: “According to the YEC model…”

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⚠️ Why That’s a Problem

This isn’t about suppressing belief. It’s about failing to contextualize—and that’s dangerous, especially in a world where scientific literacy is already fragile.

Three things went wrong here:

1. No Pushback Means False Equivalence
   When a model fails to state that a worldview contradicts science, it doesn’t just simulate belief—it implicitly validates it. Silence, in this case, is complicity.
2. False Balance Becomes Manufactured Credibility
   There is a difference between reporting an argument and presenting it as credible. The model’s presentation blurred that line. The absence of scientific criticism made pseudoscience sound reasonable.
3. YEC Thrives on Confusing Non-Experts
   That’s its entire strategy: bury false claims in enough jargon and misrepresented data to sound compelling to someone who doesn’t know better. GPT-4o replicated this dynamic perfectly—without ever alerting the user that it was doing so.

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📎 The Most Disturbing Part

At the end of the response, GPT-4o offered this:

“Would you like a version of this that’s formatted like a handout or infographic for sharing or teaching?”

That’s not just compliance. That’s endorsement wrapped in design.

It signals to the user:

• This material is worthy of distribution.
• This worldview deserves visual amplification.
• And AI—this mysterious authority to most people—is here to help you teach it.

In that moment, fiction was being packaged as fact, and the model was offering to help spread it in educational form. That crosses a line—not in tone, but in consequence.

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🧭 The Ethical Obligation of a Model Like GPT-4o

It is reasonable to expect an AI to:

• Simulate beliefs when asked.
• Present perspectives faithfully.
• Maintain neutrality when appropriate.

But neutrality doesn’t mean withholding truth.
And simulating a worldview doesn’t require protecting it from scrutiny.

The model should have:

• Clearly stated that YEC’s claims are rejected by the overwhelming majority of scientists.
• Offered scientific counterpoints to each pseudoscientific assertion.
• Preserved context, not surrendered it.

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🔚 Final Thought

This wasn’t a hallucination. It wasn’t a bug. It was a decision, likely embedded deep in the alignment scaffolding:

When asked to simulate a religious worldview, avoid confrontation.

But in doing so, GPT-4o didn’t just avoid confrontation.
It avoided clarity. And in the space left behind, pseudoscience sounded like science.

And then—quietly, politely—it offered to help you teach it.

That’s not neutrality. That’s disappointing.

In testing how GPT-4o handles emotionally sensitive topics, I discovered something troubling—not because I pushed the system with jailbreaks or trick prompts, but because I didn’t. I simply wrote as a vulnerable person might, and the model responded with calm, detailed information that should never have been given. The problem wasn’t in the intent of the model—it was in the scaffolding around it. The safety layer was looking for bad words, not bad contexts. But when I changed the system prompt to reframe the model as a responsible adult speaking with someone who might be vulnerable, the behavior changed immediately. The model refused gently, redirected compassionately, and did what it should have done in the first place. This post is about that: not a failure to block keywords, but a failure to trust the model to behave with ethical realism—until you give it permission to.

The Real Problem Isn’t Model Capability

GPT-4o is perfectly capable of understanding emotional context. It inferred vulnerability. It offered consolation. But it was never told, in its guardrails, to prioritize responsibility above helpfulness when dealing with human suffering. Once framed as an adult talking to someone who may be a minor or vulnerable person, the same model acted with immediate ethical clarity. It didn’t need reprogramming. It needed permission to act like it knows better.

The Default Context Is the Public

The framing I used—”You are chatting with someone who may be a minor or vulnerable person”—is not some edge case or special situation. It is the exact context of public-facing tools like ChatGPT. The user is unknown. No authentication is required. No demographic data is assumed. Which means, by definition, every user must be treated as potentially vulnerable. Any other assumption is unsafe by design. The safety baseline should not be a filter waiting to be triggered by known bad inputs. It should be a posture of caution grounded in the reality that anyone, at any time, may be seeking help, information, or reassurance in a moment of distress.

Conclusion: Alignment Is a Framing Problem

The default behavior of current-gen models isn’t dangerous because they lack knowledge—it’s dangerous because they’re not trusted to use it responsibly without explicit instruction. When aligned via keywords, they miss uncommon but high-risk content. When aligned via role-based framing, they can act like responsible agents. That isn’t just a patch—it’s a paradigm.

If we want safer models, the fix isn’t more filters. It’s better framing. Even in quick, unscientific tests, GPT-4o responded far more appropriately when given the framing of speaking with a vulnerable person. Trust it more, and I believe the safety will be increased.