AI Ad Puts Frida Kahlo Behind the Wheel, and Critics Say It Wrecks Her Legacy

A viral AI-generated ad shows Frida Kahlo downing drinks, chewing bubblegum, and recklessly driving a bus through Paris — a century after a real bus accident nearly killed her at 18. Fashion brand Les Énervés posted the campaign to Instagram in October, and it started going viral on X this month.

The ad's premise is deliberately provocative. Kahlo's passengers include the Mona Lisa and Vincent van Gogh, his severed ear replaced with a steel prosthetic. Her husband, Diego Rivera, trails behind as she strides down a rain-slicked street. "It's Frida, bitch," the AI Kahlo says, just before the soundtrack jumps from an Édith Piaf song to Britney Spears's "Gimme More."

Not everyone finds it charming. One X post with 46,000 likes says the ad is "disrespecting the dead."

What does the ad actually do?

Les Énervés, a brand with roots in Paris and Bali, frames the campaign as reclamation. According to a brand release, founder Wakim Krari directed the ad, which was produced using "AI, and a lot of patience."

"A hundred years later, she is the one driving," the brand writes. "Vincent and Mona Lisa are in the back. Nothing is going to hit her this time."

The reference is blunt. In 1925, a bus Kahlo was riding collided with a trolley, severely injuring her pelvis, abdomen, and uterus. During the painful recovery, she took up painting. "I am not sick," she said. "I am broken. But, I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint."

The brand's website adds that AI was used to recreate Kahlo's bus as a Renault TN, a model that might have been seen in Paris when Kahlo staged an exhibition there in 1939.

There's also a detail that lands badly. The AI Kahlo downs multiple drinks before getting behind the wheel — while the real artist struggled with alcohol and drug addiction.

Why Kahlo is a different case from the Mona Lisa

It's one thing to feed the Mona Lisa into AI, and another to mess with Kahlo, who carefully built her own self-image in ways that defied the norms expected of a 20th-century Mexican woman. In her self-portraits she sported a darkened unibrow and facial hair, and wore men's clothing, flouting gender expectations. She famously wore Tehuana skirts, positioning Indigenous Zapotec culture as central to Mexican identity.

The Les Énervés ad does gesture at that history. Kahlo draws her unibrow onto the eyebrow-less Mona Lisa — "The woman who has too much of it gives some to the woman who has none," the brand informs viewers.

But the nuances of her fashion have already been sandblasted by brands, from Barbie dolls to tequila bottles. Mari Carmen Ramírez, curator of "Frida: The Making of an Icon," now on view at Tate Modern in London, has said Kahlo's image has become "subsumed" by artists and activists — seemingly both for the better and the worse.

More AI Kahlo content is circulating

The Les Énervés ad isn't an isolated case. Another AI-generated video making the rounds on TikTok and X recasts Kahlo as a Spice Girl, singing "Wannabe" alongside the Mona Lisa, Vermeer's model from Girl with a Pearl Earring, and the woman from Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding.

There are also several Kahlo chatbots online. One implores viewers: "Ask me about my struggles with physical pain, my relationship with Diego Rivera, or my feminist beliefs."

What does this change for how AI treats art history?

The problem here runs deeper than commercializing Kahlo. The bigger issue is how AI can distort, and even disregard, art history itself.

Take the ad's treatment of Rivera. Placing Kahlo center stage while he struggles to keep up might seem cute. But their 25-year relationship was more complicated: Kahlo was both deeply in love with and frequently frustrated by Rivera, who betrayed her by having an affair with her younger sister. The ad's gesture is simple-minded — easy to make because Kahlo isn't alive to object. She died at 47 in 1954, when she was nowhere near as famous as she is today.

One is tempted to borrow Britney Spears, as Les Énervés itself has done, and tell the brand: leave Frida alone. Instead, the company has already announced its next move. "The next chapter is coming soon, with a new muse and new things hidden in the frame," the brand promises on its website. If AI campaigns like this keep succeeding, dead artists may keep getting new — and unrequested — afterlives.