AI Did NOT Destroy the World… This Year, Anyway

There are certain rituals humanity performs every year with remarkable consistency. We promise to become better people, we pretend we enjoy fireworks launched by amateurs, and we nervously check to see whether the world has ended while New Zealand quietly confirms that it has not. Again.

The What The Frock New Year’s Eve episode for 2025 opens not with panic, prophecy, or a blinking red countdown clock, but with something far more dangerous. Reflection. And champagne. Preferably dry. Very dry. Possibly poured into a mug that was never meant to hold it .

This year’s last hour of the year, “AI Did NOT Destroy The World… This Year, Anyway…”, is not about artificial intelligence conquering humanity, demanding citizenship, or replacing rabbis and friars with eerily polite podcast simulators. Instead, it is about the far stranger reality. AI did exactly what tools have always done. It amplified the humans holding it.

Throughout the episode, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod circle the same uneasy truth from different angles. AI is powerful, impressive, occasionally useful, and still astonishingly capable of being confidently wrong. When asked to list the year’s episodes, it proudly declared there were only eleven, then defended that answer with the soothing certainty of a bureaucrat who has misplaced the entire filing cabinet . This alone should comfort anyone worried about machines achieving omniscience before lunchtime.

There are stories here, because What The Frock always understands that stories explain things better than manifestos. A Navy tale involving peppermint schnapps, coconuts, admirals, and seasickness reminds us that human error long predates algorithms. A champagne bottle is opened at precisely the wrong moment. AI voices are tested. Bears are briefly considered a credible threat. None of this is simulated. All of it is gloriously human.

The episode also returns, gently but firmly, to the show’s central thesis. Technology does not replace judgment. It reveals it. When AI is used as a tool, it accelerates creativity, reduces friction, and frees time. When it is treated as an oracle, it hallucinates confidence and gaslights its operator with breathtaking sincerity. The danger is not replacement. The danger is abdication.

There is something comforting about ending 2025 this way. Not with a sermon about the future, but with a raised eyebrow and a toast. Not with declarations of doom, but with laughter at the idea that AI could not even count the episodes correctly, let alone run civilization .

So no, AI did not destroy the world this year. People still managed to do plenty of damage on their own, unaided. And that, oddly enough, is the most reassuring news of all.

Welcome to the What The Frock New Year’s Eve special. Bring curiosity. Bring skepticism. And whatever you do, do not let the machines keep score.