SKF Recreates Late Hollywood Icon Greta Garbo Using Generative AI for Commercial
Swedish manufacturer SKF launched a commercial featuring an AI-generated synthetic version of late Hollywood actress Greta Garbo. Created with permission from Garbo's estate, the digital avatar was produced using generative text-to-image, video, and audio AI tools without using archived film footage. The campaign demonstrates how multi-model generative AI pipelines are maturing to commercial adoption in synthetic media and advertising. However, it also amplifies ethical debates and industry concerns regarding digital likeness rights and post-mortem AI portrayals. To avoid copyright issues with historical media, SKF generated Garbo's visual appearance entirely from text prompts using tools like ByteDance's Seedream 5 Pro, Google Gemini's Nano Banana Pro, ByteDance's Seedance 2/2.5, and Kuaishou's Kling AI. Her voice was trained on authorized audio from an early film and fine-tuned with human voice actors to match speech cadence.
## BACKGROUND
Greta Garbo was a legendary Swedish-American actress from Hollywood's Golden Age who retired from acting in 1941 and passed away in 1990. Over a century ago, Garbo appeared in an early promotional video introducing Swedish industry, which featured SKF. Modern generative AI video models like Kling AI and Seedance allow creators to synthesize photorealistic human movement and video clips directly from text prompts or multimodal inputs.