SKF Revives Greta Garbo as a Dull AI Ghost in 99-Second Ad

Swedish bearing manufacturer SKF has resurrected Greta Garbo with artificial intelligence for a 99-second advertisement — and the result, according to a Guardian review published on 30 September, is "bizarre" and "humourless".

The Guardian's verdict is blunt: this "dull AI Greta Garbo" is not the future anyone should want. The critic writes that the digitally exhumed screen legend gives viewers "another reason to resent AI".

The choice of Garbo is what makes the advertisement so peculiar. The Swedish-American actor, born Greta Gustafsson in Stockholm in 1905, built her mythology on refusal. She turned her back on Hollywood at the height of her fame and spent the last decades of her life in deliberate seclusion in New York, famously distilled into a single line from Grand Hotel: "I want to be alone."

The Guardian review situates the ad within a long comic tradition of Garbo impersonation — a tradition the AI version conspicuously fails to join. It recalls the 1970 Peter Cook and Dudley Moore television sketch in which Cook plays the legendary recluse standing on the back of a flatbed truck rumbling through crowded city streets, shouting at passersby through a megaphone: "I vant to be alone!"

That sketch worked because it understood the joke: Garbo's withdrawal was so absolute, so theatrical, that parodying it was an act of affection. The SKF advertisement, by contrast, recruits the actor's image without wit or irony. The review finds nothing in the 99 seconds that earns the borrowing — no humour, no insight, no reason for Garbo to be there at all beyond the novelty of a computer puppet speaking in her likeness.

"Poor Greta Garbo," the review opens. It is a fitting epitaph for a project that takes an actor celebrated for controlling her own image — she who withheld it from the world for nearly fifty years — and puts it back to work without her consent, her voice or any living collaborator who knew her.

The Garbo stunt follows a growing pattern in advertising and entertainment: estates and brands licensing deceased performers for posthumous performances generated by machine learning. Each new case tests the ethics of consent, the rights of the dead and the aesthetic value of the results. On the evidence of this review, the SKF ad fails on the last count at minimum — not merely troubling, but boring.

The Guardian's closing warning is the one that lingers: let's hope this is not the future. As AI resurrection moves from technical curiosity to standard marketing practice, the Garbo ad suggests the technique may drain even the most vivid screen presences of what made them worth reviving in the first place.