SKF Used AI to Bring Greta Garbo Back for an Ad — and Not Everyone Is Pleased

October 5 (IT Home) — “Are we rolling?” asks an AI-generated likeness of the 1930s Hollywood star Greta Garbo, softly. It is a rather unexpected advertisement, and the advertiser is the Swedish ball-bearing manufacturer SKF.

According to Reuters, the advertisement has caused a stir, drawing praise and mockery alike. It also highlights how increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence is permeating the media world, from scriptwriting all the way to animation.

Greta Garbo was one of the most famous stars of Hollywood’s “Golden Age.” She died in 1990 at the age of 84, having left the screen and withdrawn from public view decades earlier, in 1941.

SKF says it used artificial intelligence to “bring back” the Swedish-American actress. More than a century ago, Garbo appeared in a short film promoting Swedish industry abroad — and SKF was one of the subjects it promoted.

The AI figure, wearing a champagne-coloured silk top, says in the advertisement: “One of the films I made early on was for SKF. Now I have returned to complete my last work.”

SKF says this version of Garbo did not use archived photographs or historical footage. Per Nilsson, the company’s head of brand and communications, explained that, for copyright reasons, the figure was generated using text prompts.

SKF says that for image generation the production team used ByteDance’s Seedream 5 Pro and Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro, and for motion generation it used ByteDance’s Seedance 2 and Seedance 2.5, as well as Kling AI from Beijing-based Kuaishou Technology.

The voice was created by training AI on the original audio from one of Garbo’s early films. This was the only archived audio material SKF provided to the AI, after obtaining authorisation; real actors were also involved to help adjust the rhythm and intonation of the speech.

“I think we did this in a respectful way,” Nilsson said. The advertising project was made with the cooperation and permission of the Greta Garbo estate and her family.

Henry Ajder, an AI consultant and researcher, notes that although this is not the first time businesses have used the likeness of a deceased person to promote products, the advertisement shows what today’s new technology can achieve. He calls this phenomenon “synthetic resurrection.”

“This trend has actually existed for years — it is just that AI has given it much greater power,” he said.

But not everyone approves.

The Guardian’s film critic Peter Bradshaw gave the advertisement one star, writing: “Poor Greta Garbo.” He added that it gave people one more reason to dislike artificial intelligence.

IT Home notes that a number of living stars are also uneasy about the trend. The actor George Clooney said at the Venice Film Festival last month: “I don’t want to be appearing in a tampon ad twenty years after I’m dead.”