Bartlett’s AI show for kids adds yet more fuel to the ire

Katie Rosseinsky wades into the heated debate surrounding Steven Bartlett, the polarising ‘Diary of a CEO’ podcaster

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Sentient vegetables are striding through an AI-generated – uncanny – valley, led by a young Steven Bartlett.

They’re dishing out recycled podcast truisms about mindset and motivation. At some point, they burst into song.

This is not some heatwave-induced fever dream, or the sort of psychedelic experience that would be a better anti-drug deterrent than any government campaign. This is, apparently, an early concept for Bartlett’s new TV show for kids, set to be released later this summer on YouTube and Spotify.

Steven’s World is the entrepreneur’s latest venture, according to a new report in The Observer. The show will reportedly repackage lessons from interviews on Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast using an AI model fed by previous episodes, aiming to make those ideas more digestible for kids. Whether their parents can stomach it, though, might depend on their tolerance for one of the most divisive - and increasingly ubiquitous - figures in British pop culture.

If the Instagram comments are anything to go by, Bartlett’s latest strides into AI’s brave new world - he previously released a show called 100 CEOs, in which his AI clone narrates the life stories of various founders - are going down about as well as a glass of coagulated Huel. “Please never put all those words together ever again,” one user begged. “Can he just stop?” another asked.