Greta Garbo Asked to Be Let Alone: AI Made Her Sell Bearings

The first thing the new Greta Garbo says is “Are we rolling?” She stands beside a stool in a silk blouse and stylish slacks, key-lit like a 1930s movie star, and for the next minute and a half she purrs her way through a script about industrial efficiency. Around 20 per cent of all global energy, she explains, is lost to friction. “A terrible waste.” Then she signs off with the line every film buff knows, the one she has apparently returned from the dead to say on behalf of a Swedish bearings manufacturer: “I want to be alone.”

The advert runs for 99 seconds. It was released on 30 September 2026 by SKF, the Gothenburg engineering company, and it was made almost entirely with generative AI. Its star died in New York in April 1990, aged 84. She had not made a film since 1941. For most of the half-century in between she declined interviews, dodged photographers, and checked into hotels under a false name.

Her family approved it. Craig Reisfield, Garbo's great-nephew and one of three relatives who manage her legacy, told Robert Booth, the Guardian's UK technology editor, that he was “flabbergasted” when he first saw the result. “I was totally impressed: the mannerisms that they could capture and manipulate, her dress, facial images and even her voice,” he said. “It was startling what they could do and very impactful. And it was touching, from my perspective having known her.” Asked whether the digital Garbo might take on other work, he did not hesitate: “I won't say no, especially having seen what I've seen. It's pretty incredible and lifelike. So what's to say that you can't bring Greta Garbo back in some kind of fashion in a film role?”

The Guardian's film critic, Peter Bradshaw, gave the advert one star. “Poor Greta Garbo,” his review began, before describing the AI version as “a Stepford robo-star, a Hallmark-greeting-card parody” of the real woman. Critics of the wider practice already have a name for it: ghostploitation.

But the most revealing detail is tucked into SKF's press release. The campaign, it says, was “developed in collaboration with Greta Garbo's family and Harriet Brown & Company Inc., whose support has ensured that Greta Garbo's legacy is handled responsibly.” Harriet Brown was the name Garbo used when she wanted to disappear. In April 1976, People magazine caught her arriving at a resort in Antigua, where her niece signed the guest register as “Mrs. Gray Reisfield” and “Harriet Brown,” New York City. That niece was Gray Reisfield, Craig's mother, who would go on to inherit everything. The company that now holds the rights to Garbo's name, image, likeness, signature and voice is named after the alias that once kept that face out of sight.

That is the whole problem in one corporate name. When a person spent decades refusing to be seen, what does it mean for somebody else to say yes on her behalf?

How SKF Built a Garbo Without Using Garbo

The link between the actor and the bearings company is real, if slender. Around 1920 and 1921, a Stockholm teenager called Greta Gustafsson appeared in short advertising films while working at PUB, the city's department store. One of them, made in 1921, promoted Swedish industry to international audiences and featured SKF among its companies. The Guardian describes it as her second ever screen role. Bradshaw, less sentimental, calls it a brief appearance by “the 15-year-old future screen icon” in what seems to have been an offshoot of her department store work.

SKF has turned that footnote into a campaign. The advert promotes magnetic bearings, which suspend a rotating shaft in a magnetic field so that no surfaces touch, alongside a revived 1919 payment model that lets customers pay for equipment out of the energy it saves. “By bringing Greta back, we hope to open more eyes to frictionless and energy-efficient technology,” said Per Nilsson, SKF's global head of communication and brand, in the company's release. Speaking to Reuters, he sounded more defensive: “I think we did it in a respectful way.”

The production method is the interesting part. According to the Guardian and Reuters, SKF's creators did not feed moving or still images of Garbo into any model, because that material is protected by copyright. Instead they built her likeness from text prompts, describing details such as her ice-blue eyes and wavy blond bob, using image generators including ByteDance's Seedream 5 Pro and Google's Nano Banana Pro. Motion came from ByteDance's Seedance 2 and 2.5 and from Kling AI, made by the Beijing company Kuaishou. A human actor performed the role, with the AI-generated appearance laid over the top. The voice was trained on a recording from one of Garbo's early films, which Reuters reports was the only archival material fed to the AI for which SKF obtained permission.

Two consequences follow from this workaround. The first is commercial. By avoiding archive footage, SKF avoided the film studios. As Bradshaw observed, that meant dealing only with Garbo's relatives, “who might well be more amenable.” The second is philosophical. The Garbo on screen is not assembled from Garbo. It is a description of Garbo, rendered by systems whose own training data SKF has not discussed, and performed by somebody else. What the family approved is less a recording than an impression.

The script leans hard on her legend. “One of my first films was for SKF, and now I'm back for my last,” the AI Garbo says. That word “last” sits awkwardly beside Reisfield's openness to further roles, and his openness is not idle. The Guardian notes that several big studios are investing in AI start-ups, and that veteran directors including Ron Howard and Paul Schrader are working on AI-enabled films. Reuters framed the advert as evidence of how quickly sophisticated AI is moving into every part of media, from scriptwriting to animation. A feature-length AI Garbo is no longer a thought experiment. It is a licensing decision.

And the closing gag, the one about wanting to be alone, is a joke at the expense of a woman who spent years insisting she had never meant it.

The Woman Who Asked to Be Let Alone

Garbo was born in Stockholm in September 1905 and grew up in a working-class family in the Södermalm district. She won a place at the Royal Dramatic Theatre's acting school, made films in Sweden and Germany, then signed with MGM and moved to Hollywood. Silent cinema made her a star. Sound made her, according to her estate's own biography, the most popular star in the world: MGM sold Anna Christie in 1930 with the slogan “Garbo Talks!”

In Grand Hotel (1932), playing the Russian ballerina Grusinskaya, she spoke the line that would follow her for the rest of her life: “I want to be alone.” The public decided it was autobiography. It was not quite. In January 1955, the journalist John Bainbridge opened the third instalment of his Life magazine profile with Garbo's own correction, as she had told it to a friend: “I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be let alone!' There is all the difference.” Bainbridge added that the difference was “that between the legend of Garbo the recluse and the actual life of Garbo the woman.” She had friends, he wrote, and close male companions. She was seldom literally alone. What she wanted was control over who got access to her.

Her final film, Two-Faced Woman, was released in 1941 and condemned by the Legion of Decency as immoral. She never made another. The popular story says she simply walked away, but the record is more complicated, and the complication matters. The estate's official website says that Garbo “worked on several projects for fifteen years that never came to fruition, usually due to censorship issues.” In June 1949, TIME reported that she was preparing her first film in eight years, an adaptation of Balzac's La Duchesse de Langeais for the independent producer Walter Wanger, to be shot in Paris with James Mason pursued as her co-star. Screen tests were shot. According to notes from Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, which has screened surviving test footage, Wanger failed to secure financing and had to cancel the project, after which “Garbo vowed never to return to the screen.”

So the documented Garbo is not a woman who refused to perform. She is a woman who wanted to perform on her own terms, could not get them, and then chose permanent absence over compromise.

She became a US citizen in 1951 and settled in New York, where she was famous for walking everywhere. She used “Harriet Brown” on hotel registers and, by the account of a 1990 television documentary reviewed in the Baltimore Sun, often went about in disguise. When the Academy gave her an honorary award in 1954 for her “unforgettable screen performances,” she received it in absentia. Only in the late 1980s did she agree to a series of conversations with the Swedish journalist Sven Broman, held intermittently in New York and Switzerland. She died of kidney disease at New York Hospital on 15 April 1990. There was no funeral. Her ashes lie in Skogskyrkogården, the woodland cemetery in Stockholm.

That is the evidence anyone claiming to speak for her has to work with. It does not say she hated cinema. It says, repeatedly and across five decades, that she wanted to decide when and how she was seen.

Who Holds the Right to Say Yes

When Garbo died, her will named one beneficiary and executor: her niece, Gray Reisfield, the daughter of her late brother, described in UPI's report as Garbo's “friend and confidant.” Gray Reisfield died in 2017, aged 85. Today the commercial side of the estate sits with Harriet Brown & Company, Inc., which the official Garbo website describes as “the successor-in-interest to the intellectual property rights to the name, image, likeness, signature and voice of Greta Garbo.” The company, the site says, “looks for licensing and image usage opportunities that preserve, protect and enhance the image of Greta Garbo.” Reisfield repeated the same three verbs to the Guardian, adding that the custodians were “very discerning” about partnerships.

The licensing record is long. The estate lists Ferragamo, Dolce & Gabbana, LVMH, Montblanc, Nordstrom, the US Postal Service and Madonna's Super Bowl XLVI half-time show among past and current partners. It also lists Sveriges Riksbank: Garbo's portrait, engraved from a photograph by Clarence Sinclair Bull, appears on Sweden's 100-krona banknote. According to the Guardian, the SKF advert is the first time her likeness has been used posthumously in moving images.

Reisfield's case deserves to be taken seriously. He is not a faceless rights holder. He knew her, drove for her, and saw her often at family occasions in New York. He makes a genuine argument about her career: “She was at the forefront of cinema in the silent film era. She made the transition to 'talkies' and dominated box office receipts. So to imagine her as an AI-enabled actor given her track record and ability to captivate and connect with audiences of both men and women isn't inconceivable.” On this reading, Garbo was a pioneer of new screen technology, and an AI Garbo is continuity rather than betrayal.

The trouble is what the word consent is being asked to carry. Ordinarily, consent has a few defining features. It is given by the person who will live with the consequences. It is informed and specific. And it can be withdrawn. Consent given by heirs on behalf of the dead has none of these properties in relation to the person depicted. She cannot be informed, cannot object to the script, and cannot change her mind after seeing the result. What the family can offer is something different and more modest: a judgement about what she might have accepted, combined with a legal authority to license. Both are real. Neither is her consent, and calling it that obscures the very question the advert raises.

“The family,” moreover, is not one mind. In 2017, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Craig Reisfield had sued his brother Derek in Marin County over the whereabouts of Garbo's honorary Oscar and a carved whale tooth given to her by President John F. Kennedy, allegations Derek disputed through his lawyer. Family disputes are ordinary. They are also a reminder that heirs are individuals with their own memories, interests and judgements. What passes through a will is property. A mind does not pass with it.

A Law Written for the Dead Who Stay Dead

Here is the uncomfortable fact for anyone who assumes the law has settled this: in the two places that mattered most to Garbo, the law offers her very little.

Sweden's Act on Names and Pictures in Advertising, passed in 1978, requires consent before a person's name or image is used in marketing. It applies only to the living. The government bill that introduced it, Proposition 1978/79:2, is remarkably candid about why. Several consultees, including the Chancellor of Justice, argued for some protection after death. The drafting committee disagreed, reasoning (in translation) that “presumably, one need not fear that a deceased person's image and name will come into more frequent use in advertising.” The responsible minister agreed that “the risk of misuse of a deceased person's image or name in advertising is insignificant.” Where nobody can give consent, for example because the person depicted is dead, the bill says the marketer is “in principle free” to proceed, subject to limits such as the criminal law on defaming the dead. Forty-eight years later, that assumption reads like a period piece.

New York, where Garbo lived and died, recognised no posthumous right of publicity until a statute signed in November 2020. Section 50-f of the Civil Rights Law took effect on 29 May 2021 and, as the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine noted at the time, “only affords these rights to celebrities who die on or after that date.” What that gap means was tested in Marilyn Monroe's case. In 2012, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that because Monroe's executors had long maintained she was domiciled in New York, her estate could not rely on California's posthumous right, and New York offered none.

That does not mean Harriet Brown & Company has nothing to license. Copyrights, contracts, other jurisdictions and the plain commercial value of an authorised association all count. But it does suggest the estate's role in the SKF advert rests as much on reputation and practice as on any statutory power to forbid it. SKF chose to work with the family. Swedish advertising law did not oblige it to.

Elsewhere, lawmakers are scrambling to catch up. California's AB 1836, signed on 17 September 2024, extended the state's protection for deceased personalities to digital replicas in audiovisual works and sound recordings, requiring the consent of the rights holders, whose rights can last 70 years after death. Its companion, AB 2602, protects living performers from vague contract clauses that sign away their digital doubles. In December 2025, New York amended Section 50-f to remove a safe harbour that had let producers escape liability with a conspicuous disclaimer, and passed a separate law, in force since 9 June 2026, requiring adverts to disclose “synthetic performers,” with fines of $1,000 for a first violation and $5,000 thereafter. Tennessee's ELVIS Act, signed on 21 March 2024, extended its personal rights law to AI imitations of voices.

At federal level, the NO FAKES Act was reintroduced in May 2026 and advanced unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee on 18 June. Its post-mortem right would last ten years and could be renewed, with proof of active use, up to 70 years after death. Europe is moving too. A Danish bill would give people rights over realistic digital imitations of their appearance and voice lasting 50 years after death, although the European Commission has raised objections to its use of copyright law. The EU AI Act's transparency rules require anyone deploying a deepfake to disclose that the content is artificial, with a lighter obligation for evidently artistic or creative work.

Read together, these regimes share one striking feature. They all answer the question “who may consent for the dead?” in the same way: whoever holds the rights. The SAG-AFTRA agreement that ended the 2023 actors' strike is typical. Consent to a digital replica survives a performer's death unless otherwise agreed, and after death it can be given by an authorised representative or, failing that, by the union. None of these frameworks requires anyone to ask what the dead person actually wanted. Consent becomes a transaction between the living.

Every Resurrection Has a Different Signature

The growing list of AI revivals shows why that omission matters, because the cases that feel acceptable and the cases that feel grotesque differ mostly in how clearly the dead person spoke for themselves.

At one end is Val Kilmer. The AI performance in As Deep as the Grave was made with the consent of his children, and his estate was paid and supplied archive material. But Kilmer had also signed on to the film years before his death in 2025, and he had already used an AI model of his own voice, built by the company Sonantic after throat cancer damaged his speech. “The chance to narrate my story, in a voice that feels authentic and familiar, is an incredibly special gift,” he said in 2021. His daughter Mercedes said he “always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling.” That is about as close to genuine consent as a posthumous performance gets.

Next comes Virtually Parkinson, a podcast announced in 2024 and hosted by an AI version of the British broadcaster Sir Michael Parkinson. The idea came from his son Mike, who had worked alongside his father for more than 20 years, and the producers, Deep Fusion Films, said the AI host would announce at the start of every episode that it was artificial. Warner Music's AI-assisted animated biopic of Édith Piaf was approved by the executors of her estate, Catherine Glavas and Christie Laume, who described “a special and touching experience to be able to hear Edith's voice once again.” Note the word “touching.” It is the same word Reisfield used.

Then the cases get murkier. In 2016, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story digitally rebuilt Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, over the performance of the actor Guy Henry, with a licence from his estate's executors. The production company Tyburn later sued, claiming that Cushing himself had signed a 1993 agreement restricting special-effects reproductions of his likeness. In December 2025 the Court of Appeal struck out the claim. Whatever the merits, the episode shows how a dead person's own paperwork can collide with an estate's later judgement.

In 2019, the producers of a Vietnam War drama called Finding Jack announced that a CGI James Dean would star, saying his family supported them. Mark Roesler, chief executive of CMG Worldwide and the family's business agent, called it “a whole new frontier for many of our iconic clients.” Chris Evans responded on Twitter: “I'm sure he'd be thrilled. This is awful.”

Morgan Neville's 2021 documentary Roadrunner used AI to voice three lines Anthony Bourdain had written but never spoken aloud. “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later,” Neville joked to the New Yorker. He later said he had acted “with the blessing of his estate and literary agent.” Bourdain's former wife, Ottavia Bourdain, replied publicly: “I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that.”

And at the far end is Robin Williams, who did something that, as far as the public record shows, Garbo never did. His trust barred commercial exploitation of his name and likeness, including adverts and holograms, for 25 years after his death in August 2014. When AI videos of him circulated in 2025, his daughter Zelda asked people, “if you've got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. It's dumb, it's a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it's NOT what he'd want.”

The pattern is clear. Legitimacy tracks the strength of the dead person's own signal. Where the individual consented in life, as Kilmer did, a revival feels like completion. Where the heirs are guessing, as with Bourdain and Dean, it feels like ventriloquism. Garbo's case is unusual because her signal is strong on one subject and ambiguous on another. On publicity, she could hardly have been clearer. On performance, she left a record of thwarted ambition.

Can the Dead Be Wronged

Philosophers have argued about this since antiquity. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on death, by Steven Luper, sets out the debate. Thomas Nagel argued in 1970 that “a man's life includes much that does not take place within the boundaries” of that life, and that there is “a simple account of what is wrong with breaking a deathbed promise. It is an injury to the dead man.” Others, such as Ernest Partridge, held that the dead cannot be harmed but can still be wronged. That distinction turns out to be useful here. Nobody believes the AI Garbo hurts Greta Garbo. The question is whether it disrespects choices she made while she was alive to make them.

Researchers who study the digital afterlife industry have started to put this in practical terms. In a 2024 paper in Philosophy and Technology, Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska and Tomasz Hollanek of Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence urged designers to seek consent from people before they die, and recommended “design protocols that prevent deadbots being utilised in disrespectful ways, such as for advertising.” They also accepted that banning recreations of people who never consented would be unfeasible, and proposed instead that anyone resurrecting a loved one be prompted with questions such as “have you ever spoken with X about how they would like to be remembered?” “It's important to prioritise the dignity of the deceased, and ensure that this isn't encroached on by financial motives,” Nowaczyk-Basińska said. Henry Ajder, an AI adviser and researcher, told Reuters the Garbo advert is an example of “synthetic resurrection,” a trend “going back quite some years now,” which “AI has superpowered in a way.”

Apply that test to SKF and something specific stands out. The advert does not simply show Garbo. It makes her say new things, in a reconstructed voice, in support of a product, and then it closes on the one sentence she spent years correcting. Bainbridge's 1955 profile records her objecting to exactly the conflation the advert performs: treating a character's line as her personal creed. The finale is not an homage to Garbo's wish for privacy. It turns that wish into a punchline for a brand, delivered by a version of her who has no privacy left to protect.

Telling Stewardship From Use

None of this makes the SKF advert unlawful, and it is fair to say it was handled with more care than many AI revivals. It did not train on archive footage, it involved the family from the start, and it was openly presented as AI. The harder question is the one raised by the estate's own motto. “Preserve” and “protect” are the language of stewardship. “Enhance” is where use creeps in.

A workable distinction can be built from five questions.

Whose words are these? Restoring a print of Camille, publishing letters, or putting a studio portrait on a banknote curates what the person actually did. Generating new speech and new performances makes the person do something she never did. The first is custody of a record. The second is authorship in her name.

Who benefits? Stewardship serves the person's work and memory, even when money changes hands. Use serves a third party's product, with the person as the delivery mechanism. A ball-bearing advert sits clearly on the second side, however charming its historical connection.

Does it contradict her documented choices? Garbo's record is not a blank to be filled with the heirs' instincts. She avoided publicity for 49 years, used an alias to stay unrecognised, and refused to return to the screen on terms she had not chosen. A one-off advert that trades on her mystique sits uneasily with that. An open-ended licence for future AI film roles, which Reisfield declined to rule out, would cut directly against it.

Is the audience told? Disclosure does not create consent, but deception compounds the wrong. SKF disclosed. New York's synthetic performer law and the EU AI Act are making disclosure a baseline rather than a courtesy.

Does it stop? Williams' trust understood that the danger is not one appearance but a franchise. Once a convincing AI Garbo exists, the question shifts from whether to how often.

An estate that wanted to be on the right side of those questions could do so without giving up its income. It could publish the principles it applies, so that “very discerning” means something checkable. It could license her existing image freely while declining to put new words in her mouth. And it could treat her own documented choices, the alias, the refusals, the 1949 vow, as binding evidence rather than colourful backstory.

By those measures, most of what Garbo's estate has done over three decades looks like stewardship: licensing existing images, supporting products associated with her style, and putting her face on the currency of the city where she grew up. The SKF advert is something else. It is a use, carefully done and legally permitted, of a person who left far more evidence about her wishes than most.

The Audience That Never Stopped Asking

There is a third party in all this, and it is the one with the least claim and the most influence: the audience. It never stopped wanting Garbo back. In 1955, Life was already calling her 13-year absence from the screen a “mystery.” Her value as an image, the thing that makes her estate's licences worth signing, comes almost entirely from that unsatisfied desire. The legend of the recluse is a commercial asset precisely because she was a recluse. Reuters reported that the advert “sparked debate, praise and ridicule,” which is what happens when a century of longing finally gets an answer it did not ask for.

That is why the audience's wishes should weigh least of all. Wanting someone is not a reason to override what she chose. George Clooney, speaking at the Venice Film Festival in September 2026, put the living performer's version of the fear bluntly: “I would like to avoid being in a tampon commercial 20 years after I'm dead.” He has time to write that into a contract. Garbo had no reason to imagine the technology, and her heirs have filled the silence with their own judgement.

Perhaps the clearest guide is the one hiding in that corporate name. In 1976, on a beach in Antigua, Gray Reisfield signed a guest register “Harriet Brown” in the hope that her aunt could take a solitary walk on the beach unrecognised. That was stewardship in its purest form: one family member helping another stay unseen, exactly as she wished. Fifty years later, the same name is attached to a digital Garbo who asks whether the cameras are rolling, sells bearings, and tells the world she wants to be alone. She never said that, she once insisted. She only asked to be let alone. There is, as she put it, all the difference.

References

1. Robert Booth. “Reanimated AI Greta Garbo stars again … in a ball-bearing advert.” The Guardian, 30 September 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/sep/30/ai-greta-garbo-stars-again-ball-bearing-advert
2. Peter Bradshaw. “SKF advert review: let's hope this dull AI Greta Garbo is not the future.” The Guardian, 30 September 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/sep/30/skf-advert-review-lets-hope-this-dull-ai-greta-garbo-is-not-the-future
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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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