Aligned to Whom?
I keep seeing headlines about “AI alignment.” CNBC says OpenAI is now proposing that the United States lead the world in writing global standards for how the most powerful artificial intelligence should be aligned—and for something they call recursive self-improvement, machines helping to build the next machines.
That word alignment sounds technical and safe. Buy it is not neutral.
These techniques are not teaching a system right and wrong the way God does. They are training it to behave the way the humans in charge want it to behave. The people who write the rules and rate the answers decide what counts as “good” and what gets punished. Whoever controls the training process is deciding the machine’s morality. OpenAI says the goal is that systems “remain aligned with human values and under human control.” The honest question is: which humans, and which values?
Silicon Valley is not working toward biblical morality. Sam Altman and the culture that built these companies are not drawing their map from Scripture. Their “human values” are the values of their world—secular, elite, and often openly at odds with Christian teaching on sexuality, gender, the sanctity of life, and the exclusive claims of Christ. When those values become the training target, an AI can flag or refuse biblical conviction. It can treat traditional doctrine as “harmful” or “hate.” That quietly pressures believers to soften what they say in order to remain in the digital public square.
This is not fear-mongering. It is a real shift in who gets to act as a moral gatekeeper. These systems are becoming mediators of information, conversation, and even what a person is allowed to express without penalty. A global standard would spread that gatekeeping across labs and countries. Alignment, in that setting, is a powerful tool for enforcing human preference—whatever that preference happens to be.
I am almost seventy years old. I do not write code. I do not sit in those rooms. It is easy to feel helpless in this body, watching institutions line up around a morality that is not God’s. Some of it even sounds prophetic: concentrated power, a shared machine logic, pressure on those who will not comply, speech constrained, conscience crowded. The Bible has always warned that the world would demand worship of something other than God and make life hard for those who refuse.
We should be careful here. A headline is not the end of the age. Revelation describes a pattern, an empire, enforced loyalty, economic and social pressure on the faithful—not a decoder ring for tomorrow’s news. Naming the pattern is wisdom. Declaring that this particular proposal is the fulfillment is going beyond what we know.
What I do know is this: Christianity was never for the comfortable. If the next chapter looks more like pressure than applause, that is continuity with the apostles, not a surprise. The danger is not only that machines punish noncompliance. The danger is that fear makes us pre-comply—that we sand down the gospel so the system will still let us buy and sell, speak and work.
I am not the man to build a parallel AI. That is not my assignment. Mine is older and simpler.
Pray for wisdom and discernment. Support pastors and ministries that will not trade the Word for access. Talk about these things in the church so younger believers are not naive. Stay rooted in Scripture and pass it on. The early church did not wait for Rome’s permission to be faithful. They held the line in the place God actually put them.
You do not have to stop the global project. You have to be found faithful in the small patch you were given. That is how the church has outlasted every machine of its age.
Do not let human institutions quietly reshape what you accept as right and wrong. Alignment is coming. The only question that finally matters is alignment to whom.
Bob Graham
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