Greta Garbo is back on screen, but not in the way anyone expected. The Hollywood superstar’s likeness has been reanimated with AI for a 99-second advert for SKF, a Swedish industrial company, creating a striking collision between classic cinema and modern machine-generated imagery.
Garbo’s AI performance is intercut with shots of ball-bearings as the advert explains that around 20% of all global energy is lost to friction: a terrible waste. The message is industrial, but the image at its center is cultural and personal: a digital recreation of a performer who died in 1990.
A Digital Garbo Built Without Her Images
The AI likeness was created with AI imaging technology, including Google’s Nano Banana Pro. The production team did not feed moving or still images of Garbo into the AI because that material was protected by copyright, making the recreation a test of what these systems can produce without direct access to an actor’s visual archive.
Her voice was recreated from a recording from an early film, giving the performance a link to Garbo’s original screen career. The result aims to bring together her appearance, voice, and screen presence, yet the lines do not reach the standards of those given to her by MGM studio writers.
That gap matters. Garbo’s fame came from performances shaped by actors, directors, editors, and studio writers, while this new version depends on AI imaging, an old recording, and advertising copy built around friction and energy loss. The advert places those very different creative systems in the same frame.
At one point, the AI Garbo sounds like Liz Truss complaining about the “disgrace” of Britain’s cheese imports. The moment makes the recreation stranger, because the voice carries the history of Garbo while the words belong to a completely different setting and era.
When an Advert Becomes a Screen Test
Craig Reisfield, one of Garbo’s relatives who manages her legacy, saw the AI performance as a powerful demonstration of what the technology can do. “It was startling what they could do and very impactful. And it was touching, from my perspective having known her,” he said.
His reaction points toward the bigger question raised by the SKF advert: can a digital recreation move beyond a commercial and become a new film performance? Reisfield said, “I won’t say no, especially having seen what I’ve seen. It’s pretty incredible and lifelike. So what’s to say that you can’t bring Greta Garbo back in some kind of fashion in a film role?”
That possibility changes the stakes. An advert can use a short performance to demonstrate an idea, but a film role would ask an AI recreation to carry scenes, emotions, and a character across a much longer story. Garbo’s return would then involve more than visual resemblance; it would raise questions about who controls the performance and how her legacy is used.
The advert also shows how many tools can now sit inside one synthetic performance. Google supplied AI technology through Nano Banana Pro, while Seedream is identified as an AI model provider from China. Together, those names place the Garbo recreation inside a wider contest over the systems that generate images, voices, and screen identities.
The Next Debate Is About Permission and Performance
Garbo’s recreation arrives alongside a growing conversation about digital versions of performers, including Val Kilmer, the actor who died last year. The central issue is not only whether AI can make a likeness look convincing. It is whether a recognizable identity should return to the screen, and under what conditions.
The answer becomes harder when the technology produces a performance without using the person’s moving or still images. That process may avoid one protected archive, but it does not remove the cultural weight of the result. The recreated voice still comes from an early film, and the digital Garbo still depends on an identity that belongs to a real performer and her legacy.
Peter Bradshaw captured the unsettling side of the result: “This Garbo is a bizarre soignée figure, a Stepford robo-star, a Hallmark-greeting-card parody.” His description highlights the tension running through the advert. The recreation can look startling and lifelike, yet it can also feel disconnected from the precise human choices that made Garbo a Hollywood superstar.
That tension will follow every future attempt to revive a performer through AI. Film directors Ron Howard and Paul Schrader, along with AI-native filmmakers Kavan the Kid and Gossip Goblin, are part of the names surrounding a changing screen culture in which synthetic performers can move from experiment to entertainment.
For now, Garbo’s return belongs to a ball-bearing advert, where an AI-generated voice warns about energy lost to friction. But the 99-second performance reaches beyond SKF’s industrial message, pointing toward a future in which audiences may see familiar stars appear again through systems such as Google’s Nano Banana Pro and Seedream.
The technology has reopened the screen. The next decision is who gets to walk through it.
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