A ball-bearing firm brought Greta Garbo back with AI. The debate says more about the adverts you now watch

This is a NOT SCRIPTED summary of reporting published elsewhere. The underlying reports are by Reuters, The Guardian, Storyboard18 and AOL, listed with links at the foot of this article.

Greta Garbo died in 1990. In an advertisement for magnetic bearings made by the Swedish company SKF, she appeared again — an AI recreation, produced using American and Chinese AI tools, according to Reuters' report of 2 October. The ad ran about ninety-nine seconds, and it has been picked over ever since with roughly equal measures of admiration and horror.

What the campaign was selling

The product is magnetic bearings, which SKF sells to industrial customers as a way to reduce friction and energy use in rotating equipment. According to Storyboard18, the campaign revived a 1919 financing model in which customers fund the technology out of their own energy savings — an old idea attached to a new pitch. The Garbo recreation was the wrapper, not the argument.

• SKF used AI to recreate Greta Garbo in a campaign promoting magnetic bearings, per Reuters.
• The advert was reported as having drawn debate, praise and ridicule about AI in media production.
• Storyboard18 reported that the campaign revived SKF's 1919 energy-savings financing model alongside the ad.

The objection, stated fairly

AOL's review of the ad is representative of the sharpest criticism: a lifeless, mediocre resurrection — undead rather than alive — and another reason to be uneasy about AI in media. The Guardian's coverage carried a different note, reporting that relatives of Garbo felt her digital double could now be used for more glamorous roles. Both are opinions about a ninety-nine-second commercial, and neither is wrong about what they saw.

Behind the aesthetics is a structural change, and Reuters pointed at it: AI is now working its way through media production from script-writing to animation. Once synthetic performers are cheap and clearance is instant, the scarcity that used to protect a performer — her image, her consent, her exclusivity — disappears. That is a different argument from whether this particular ad is any good.

Why an industrial brand doing this is the interesting part

Consumer brands are not supposed to risk a reputational hit this way. SKF sells to factories, not to style. That the gamble was taken at all suggests a calculation about attention: a technically adept, slightly uncanny ninety-nine seconds gets talked about, and being talked about is now cheaper than buying the same attention with media spend.

The trade press reading from Storyboard18 is tellingly unromantic — it led with the financing model and the magnetic bearings, treating the ad as a wrapper. That is roughly the right proportion. The campaign was competently made, the revival was a means, and the real story is that a global industrial brand now considers synthetic celebrity a routine tool.

What this changes for what you watch

The most likely durable effect is a normalisation one. Within a few years, synthetic performers in advertising will be ordinary rather than shocking, and the interesting question will shift from whether a dead star can be brought back to whether the person whose likeness is being used had any say. This ad is a useful early case precisely because the answer was no and nobody minded very much.