SKF brings Greta Garbo back for a ball-bearing ad
SKF says its AI Greta Garbo was prompted rather than trained on her films, with only her voice licensed from an archival clip. That is the company's account: the prompts and the clip are unpublished, and the Guardian's critic panned the performance.
No frame of Greta Garbo's films went into her new ad, according to the company that paid for it. SKF, the Swedish ball-bearing maker, launched a 99-second spot on Sep 30 starring an AI recreation of Garbo, who appeared in a Swedish industry film featuring SKF in 1921 and died in 1990. SKF told Reuters the likeness was built from text prompts because of copyright, with stills made in Seedream 5 Pro and Nano Banana Pro and motion in Seedance 2, Seedance 2.5 and Kling.
The one archival asset SKF says it cleared was her voice, trained on a clip from an early film with permission, while a human actor guided the pacing and cadence. The campaign was made with Garbo's family and Harriet Brown & Company, and the Swedish trade title Resumé names the agency as Nord.
In practice, the hard part of a dead-star spot is now the clearance rather than the stack: estate consent, one licensed voice source and a human performer for timing, all wrapped around models anyone can rent. The stack did not rescue the performance either, since the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw gave the film one star and called it "bland, mediocre undeadness".
Source: SKF release, Sep 30, 2026; Reuters, Oct 2, 2026; The Guardian, Sep 30, 2026.
