Greta Garbo appeared in exactly two kinds of films: the ones that made her a legend, and one 1921 promotional short for a Gothenburg ball-bearings manufacturer called SKF. A century later, SKF has come back for more, and this time they brought AI. The resulting 99-second ad — built using China's Seedream and Google's Nano Banana Pro, animated over a human actor's performance, voiced from an archival recording — is apparently good enough that Garbo's great-nephew Craig Reisfield is now saying he won't rule out casting her in an actual film. The technical process here is worth slowing down on because it sidesteps the most obvious legal trap. The creators did not feed photographs or footage of Garbo into the models — that material is copyright-protected. Instead, they worked entirely from text prompts: ice-blue eyes, wavy blond bob, the specific quality of her stillness. The AI generated a likeness; a human actor wore it. Her voice was reconstructed from early film audio. The result, per Reisfield, cleared the uncanny valley. "The mannerisms that they could capture and manipulate, her dress, facial images and even her voice," he said. "It was startling." This is the technology arriving at a new threshold. The uncanny valley has been the practical ceiling on AI performance work — the closer to real, the worse. SKF's Garbo apparently crossed it, which is why this story is not just an advert review. Reisfield, who used to drive for his great-aunt and saw her regularly in New York, described the experience as "touching." That emotional response from someone who knew the actual person is the most significant data point in this piece, and it should make everyone think carefully about what they want this technology to become. The practice has a name in critical circles: ghostploitation. Val Kilmer, who died in 2025, has also been subjected to it. The industry is not waiting for consensus — Ron Howard, Paul Schrader, and a new wave of AI-native directors are all moving. Studios are investing in AI startups. The Garbo estate's position — "preserve, protect, and enhance" — is the same language every IP holder uses, and it will not slow the pace. What's different about Garbo is the particular irony: the actor famous for wanting to be alone, for retiring at 36 and refusing virtually every public offer for the remaining 50 years of her life, is now being considered for an indefinite digital afterlife by a relative who never had her consent to ask. The ad itself, to be fair, is reportedly dull — the Guardian's own reviewer called it "dull" in the related piece linked above, and the scriptwriting is not MGM-vintage. The moment where AI Garbo intones that "around 20% of all global energy is lost to friction: a terrible waste" has the cadence of a compliance training video, not Camille. But technical proof-of-concept doesn't need to be good art. It needs to prove the concept. SKF's Garbo does that. The question now is whether the estate, and the industry, will treat that proof as a floor or a ceiling.
