On December 28, 1895, the Lumière brothers screened ten short films in Paris. Workers leaving a factory. A train arriving at a station. A baby being fed. The newspapers reviewed the device, not the films. Nobody called it art. It was a fairground novelty — vulgar, lowbrow, for people who didn't know better.
I've spent fifteen years translating technology into business outcomes — at Booking.com, at Danone, in rooms where the technology kept changing but the human reaction stayed remarkably constant. And what I see right now with AI is an almost perfect echo of what happened with cinema, with photography, and with every major technology that eventually changed how we see the world.
AI is in its Lumière phase. It generates text, images, music, code. People look at the output and ask: is this art? Is this creativity? Is this going to replace us? The Lumière brothers asked a version of the same question. Their answer was no — they said cinema had "no future" as entertainment. They were engineers solving an engineering problem.
This pattern repeats. When photography arrived in 1839, painters declared painting was dead. When Kodak released its handheld camera in 1888, serious photographers were appalled — if anyone could take a picture with no training, it couldn't possibly be art. In 1900, art critic William Howe Downs settled it: "Photography is what the photographer makes it — an art or a trade."
Replace "photography" with "AI" and you have the exact conversation happening today.
In the corporate rooms I sit in, AI follows the same arc. First dismissal — "it's just autocomplete." Then fear — "it will replace our people." Now resistance dressed up as strategy: more pilots, more frameworks, more "let's wait until we understand it better."
What nobody in those rooms is saying — and what I think matters most — is this: AI right now is a technical problem looking like art. It produces things that resemble creativity, the way the Lumière brothers' films resembled storytelling. But resemblance is not the thing itself.
Cinema became art when Méliès took the camera and used it for a purpose the engineers never imagined. The camera was built to record reality. He used it to create dreams. It took thirty years from that first Paris screening for cinema to be widely accepted as a legitimate art form. Thirty years of "it's just moving pictures."
We're waiting for the Méliès of AI. The person who takes this engineering tool and does something with it that none of us — including the engineers — can predict. They might be in your organisation right now. They might be the one everyone dismisses as "not technical enough" or "too creative for this work."
The question isn't whether AI is art. The question is: who in your world is brave enough to use this tool for something it wasn't designed for?
That's where transformation starts. Not in the engineering. In the imagination.
I'm Vlad Sterngold. I've worked in professional kitchens, the military, advertising, my own startup, and 15 years in digital leadership at Booking.com and Danone. Now I'm building a coaching practice helping people navigate the human side of technological change.