Podcast · The Digital Executive · 2 November 2026
On The Digital Executive, Ritu Raj talks with host Brian E. Thomas about the path from a Delhi childhood among painters to a Phoenix studio, why he put ChatGPT’s name on the cover of The Unalgorithmic Self, where he draws the line on AI in art, and what people must protect in themselves as machines advance.
From the conversation
“The only access we have to beat the algorithms is abstraction, because in abstraction there is no answer.”
“A machine can answer a question. Only a human can wonder.”
“Algorithms don’t make mistakes. Humans do.”
The interview
The Digital Executive, Coruzant Technologies, 2 November 2026. Edited for reading from the episode: false starts, repetitions and asides removed.
I grew up around artists. My father was an art critic, and I grew up with some of the most remarkable painters in India. At the time many of them were poor, and I, at one of the best private schools in India, decided I would never be an artist. Life went on. I built companies, and I was always taking pictures; photography was one of my main things. Then COVID came. In San Francisco I was in complete lockdown and couldn’t go out to photograph anything. A friend reminded me of a workshop where we had put canvases out and I had painted a small two-by-two in acrylic. He said: why don’t you paint? You don’t have to leave the house. So I ordered canvases, three feet and four feet square, and acrylic, which I had used exactly once. Within a year my loft was full of paintings. I moved up to six feet by six feet, and every corner was covered. Then I came to Phoenix for a conference and fell in love with a property: a house on half an acre with an 1,800-square-foot casita where two artists had painted for eighteen years. They were selling. I said, I want this. That is how I came to Phoenix: to paint like Jackson Pollock.
First, where the title comes from. I thought I had left the word algorithm behind ten years ago, when I stopped writing them. Then I noticed that the toothbrush I use in the morning was sold to me by an algorithm. The TV show is not a TV show; it is an algorithm. It pulls at my heart, brings me down, lifts me up. I love Lioness, I read about when the next season comes out, and I know it is an algorithm. Friends’ children live on their iPads, a whole range of emotion passing through them, and friends who design games know those children are playing the way the algorithm wants them to play. Somewhere, something snapped. I started asking: where is my life not handed to me by algorithms? Can I recover my own soul? Then, in an interview with Authority Magazine, something became clear: the only access we have to beat the algorithms is abstraction, because in abstraction there is no answer. That is where my life without algorithms and abstraction meet. I wrote the book with ChatGPT as my consultant and my challenger. It helped me organize, and it helped me find sentences I couldn’t quite say. My mother was a professor of English; my English is good, but not as good as hers. ChatGPT played an important enough role that I put its name on the cover.
Some people on Reddit came at me for acknowledging it. But every good book has a copy editor. The Unalgorithmic Self went through two rounds with a professional copy editor, and copy editors change your language too, just as ChatGPT sometimes does. The difference is that they are human. This is a tool we have to accept. It is here, and it will be more pervasive than it is now.
I am not inventing a toothbrush. The algorithm offers me a toothbrush, and I use it. But here is where I draw the line: using AI to make paintings is not right, for me. I paint with my hands. I paint with a string instead of a brush: I throw it and pull it across the canvas in a single breath, my hands on the painting the whole time. When I use a brush wet with oil paint, my soul gets attached to the brush. On the other side of the line are gimmicks, a can hanging from the ceiling on a thread making marks, or AI generating an image. I like some of them. But they are repeatable, canned. When you paint with your hands there is no algorithm. It is human, and the mistakes are mine. Algorithms don’t make mistakes. Humans do.
We are little ants at the foot of Mount Everest. Two lines from the book: a machine can answer a question; only a human can wonder. A machine can process the word; only a human can feel it. However good AI becomes, it cannot wonder. I was once addicted to World of Warcraft for a year. I was a death knight, playing eighteen hours a day. If my death knight died, I could resurrect him; nothing was lost. In real life you lose things, and you learn through love, through feeling, through wondering. No one can take that from us. I think the gap between what humans can do, wonder, feel and break patterns, and what AI can do will slowly widen. We are at the cusp. All we have to remember is to keep ourselves alive as human beings, and to take care of our souls.
The young people around me, in their early twenties, are worried that AI will take their jobs. I tell them: you are well educated, with degrees in art and linguistics and more. You will be the next job creators, because you have been trained to think. Whether you are a mechanic, a computer scientist trained to think in algorithms and design new ones, or a literature graduate who can design what language does, the people trained to think will make the next jobs. The world is your oyster.
The books
Art, AI, and the Future of Human Thinking
The part of human life that refuses reduction. Not a book against AI. A book about remembering ourselves.
The Genesis of Abstraction
Painting, perception, silence and attention, and the length of string that became the Organic Movement paintings.
More
All conversations are on the podcasts page; reviews and press are on the media page. To book Ritu for a show, write to ritu@rituart.com.
Art that listens.