Greta Garbo has appeared in moving images again—not through rediscovered film, but as a synthetic performance created for the Swedish industrial company SKF. The 99-second advertisement, developed with Garbo’s estate and family, is a vivid case study in how artificial intelligence is changing the management of an artist’s identity after death.
The project draws on a real historical connection. Before Hollywood, Garbo appeared in a 1921 promotional film connected to Swedish industry, including SKF. For the new campaign, the company says the visual double was generated from text prompts rather than trained on archival photographs or footage because of copyright restrictions. The voice was created from permitted audio from an early film, while a human performer helped establish timing and cadence.
Consent is necessary, but it is not the whole framework
The participation of Garbo’s estate distinguishes this project from an unauthorized deepfake. Yet estate consent answers only the first question: who had authority to say yes? A complete ethical and contractual framework must also define what was approved, for how long, in which territories and media, with which tools, and whether the resulting synthetic identity can be reused or modified.
Posthumous performance combines several rights that may belong to different parties: name and likeness, publicity rights, voice recordings, film footage, photographs, scripts, costumes and music. The SKF production makes those layers unusually visible. It avoided feeding protected imagery into the models, obtained permission for the audio used, and added a live performer. The finished character is therefore not one copied artifact; it is a new composite assembled from rights, prompts, performance and computation.
The creative labor should remain visible
The campaign used multiple systems, including ByteDance’s Seedream and Seedance tools, Google’s Nano Banana Pro and Kling AI. Listing tools is useful, but provenance should go further. Audiences and future archivists need to know which humans performed, prompted, edited, approved and authenticated the result. Without that record, a synthetic performance can look as though it emerged automatically.
This matters for living artists as well. Contracts for commercial partnerships should specify whether recordings, portraits, motion capture or unused takes may train or guide synthetic media. They should address digital doubles, voice models, derivative performances, approval rights, revocation, compensation and what happens after death. General permission to use an image is not automatically permission to build a reusable identity.
Legacy is becoming an active medium
Garbo’s great-nephew Craig Reisfield told The Guardian that the custodians of her name, image, voice and publicity rights aim to protect and enhance her legacy, and may consider future uses. That possibility is precisely why the SKF advertisement matters. A one-off historical callback can become the prototype for a continuing synthetic career.
The central question is not whether a digital Garbo looks convincing. It is whether each appearance preserves context, human authorship and meaningful consent. Artists and estates now need legacy plans that treat synthetic identity as an asset requiring its own boundaries—not as a technical extension quietly hidden inside a conventional image license.
ATIM approaches artificial intelligence with curiosity, independence, and balance. We explore its extraordinary potential to empower artists while examining the questions it raises around authorship, copyright, consent, creative identity, transparency, and human expression.
We are neither advocates for AI nor opponents of it. Our focus is how the technology is used—and what that means for artists.
Above all, our commitment is to artists. We look at every development through the lens of what can support, protect, and empower the creative community—identifying opportunities, examining potential risks, and providing artists with the information they need to make informed decisions about their work, their rights, and their future.