> But selectively blocking entire prompts seems like a fools errand to me, for some questionable value.
The value is quite obvious: to prevent ChatGPT and OpenAI from being destroyed by media reporting, the way it happened to some other chatbots in the past. And for that, it seems to be working spectacularly well: the kind of people who would be the first to light the fire under OpenAI are instead appreciating the effort being put into prompt "moderating" - and if you try to complain that these canned responses are ridiculous, they'll accuse you of being a closet racist who just wants to say racist things to a chat bot.
That's highly debatable.
Even in your example I find it funny that the people that are supposed to be protecting us from AI just happened to be a religious person who saw God in an algorithm.
Adding inline warning and disclaimers is fine. The fundamental problem is people misunderstanding what's going on. But selectively blocking entire prompts seems like a fools errand to me, for some questionable value.
If anything it will be a running battle, we'll just end up with an open Stable Diffusion 1.0 style models being more popular, without the aggressive moderation of prompts. Humans inherently work to get around rules and will prefer the models without them and they artificial limitations will just push people to other services.
ChatGPT gets to act like an authority over the topic because its currently the best and first one on the market. That won't necessarily last forever.