AI Greta Garbo stars again in SKF ball-bearing advert
Greta Garbo is back on screen in a 99-second advert for Swedish ball-bearings maker SKF, more than 100 years after she first worked with the company.
The new film re-creates the Hollywood star with artificial intelligence and cuts her performance with close shots of ball-bearings, according to details reported by The Guardian. It was made as publicity for SKF, the Gothenburg-based industrial group. The spot runs for 99 seconds.
There is a neat loop in the casting. Garbo’s second screen role ever came in a 1921 promotional film involving SKF. She went on to become one of cinema’s most famous faces of the 1920s and 1930s before retiring from acting.
The new version was not built by feeding old photographs or film clips into a machine. The makers said that material is protected by copyright, so they worked instead with written text prompts fed to AI image systems. Those prompts described features including ice-blue eyes and a wavy blond bob.
The systems used included China’s Seedream and Google’s Nano Banana Pro, with humans writing the prompts and shaping the result. A living actor performed the part on set. Garbo’s AI-generated appearance was then laid over that performance. Her voice was rebuilt from a recording taken from one of her early films.
The reaction from her family was surprise. Craig Reisfield, Garbo’s great-nephew and one of three relatives who look after her legacy, said he was “flabbergasted” when he saw the result. He told The Guardian he would not rule out an AI Garbo taking other screen roles, saying “I won’t say no” after seeing what the technology could do.
What makes this stand out is the method as much as the name. No archive image went in, yet a recognisable Garbo came out of words, a stand-in and an old voice track.
