Summary
Swedish manufacturer SKF has used an AI-generated likeness of Greta Garbo in an advertisement linking the actor to a film she made for Swedish industry more than a century ago. SKF said it developed the campaign with Garbo’s estate and family. The visual likeness was prompted rather than built from archival images; approved audio from an early film was used to train the voice, with a human actor guiding cadence. The production combined ByteDance’s Seedream and Seedance tools, Google’s Nano Banana Pro and Kuaishou’s Kling AI. The campaign has drawn both praise and criticism over what one expert called “synthetic resurrection.”
Hana’s perspective
Consent helps. It does not settle the artistic question. The estate’s participation and licensed voice material distinguish this campaign from unauthorized imitation. Yet the ad still asks a dead performer to endorse a message she could not evaluate. That tension cannot be solved by better pixels. The more convincing synthetic resurrection becomes, the more important provenance and declared intent will be. Studios need a chain of permission for likeness, voice, training material and context—not merely a signature from whoever controls the rights. They should also ask whether revival reveals something true about the subject or merely borrows recognition. Technical respectfulness is possible. Moral authorship remains harder.
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