Greta Garbo Returns with AI: Stardom Has Another Program

Greta Garbo has returned to work, and this time she has been asked to explain magnetic bearings. The oddness of the assignment is precisely why the story matters.

SKF has launched a campaign that reconstructs the actress with artificial intelligence, drawing on a convenient historical precedent: before Garbo became the Divine, she appeared in a promotional film connected to Swedish industry in which the company was present. Hollywood might call the new campaign the revival of an intellectual property. In Gothenburg, it can be presented as corporate continuity.

Craig Reisfield, who manages Garbo’s estate, has not ruled out future film roles. The commercial logic is obvious. An iconic likeness arrives with an audience already attached to it. Marketing does not have to build recognition from zero.

The immediate debate is about digital resurrection. Talent agencies, meanwhile, have been preparing for a wider market that does not require anybody to be dead.

Hollywood’s vault has more than one exit

CAA and Veritone have built a digital vault for scans, voice recordings and other identity assets. The language around the project emphasizes protection, but also monetization. The same material that can help prevent unauthorized replicas can be licensed to create authorized ones.

The possible uses extend from alterations inside films to advertising avatars and interactive doubles. A reader might one day question the digital version of an author about the book they are reading. A fan could speak to a star in their own language. An actor famous for granting almost no interviews could eventually answer millions of people personally without interrupting lunch.

The crucial point is that the vault is prepared with the artist’s participation. Scans and recordings can be created while a career is still active, stored for uses that do not yet exist and later turned into new performances.

The agent’s job changes with it. Once, representation meant finding a role compatible with the client’s calendar. A digital double creates the possibility of finding clients compatible with several calendars at once.

We have already seen an early version of the idea. A virtual Marilyn Monroe has been built to converse in real time and adapt responses to the person speaking with her. Celebrity spent a century teaching audiences to desire an impossible intimacy. Rights holders can now begin to sell a simulation of that intimacy back to them.

The career that continues without the actor

Digital resurrection is not new. In Rogue One, Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin returned through CGI built around Guy Henry’s performance. The face recognized by audiences and the actor doing the work on set belonged to different people. Hollywood preserved continuity by redistributing the labor required to create it.

The model becomes stranger when the performance turns interactive. Fortnite experimented with a Darth Vader that could answer players using a synthetic voice based on James Earl Jones, with approval from his estate. A character known for terrifying subordinates became available for tactical conversation on demand.

Other projects use AI because a role was never completed. When illness prevented Val Kilmer from reaching the set of a film for which he had been cast, his presence was later reconstructed with generative techniques and the support of his family rather than rebuilding the production around another performer.

A conventional movie distributes the same recorded performance to millions of viewers. Synthetic performers suggest another form of distribution: the same face can inhabit different conversations, games, languages and narrative branches at the same time.

The audience no longer only watches the star. It can be given the feeling that the star has found time specifically for them.

This is licensed ubiquity. The performer’s calendar stops matching the calendar of their appearances. Prestige accumulated in front of the camera becomes fuel for a presence that can operate in many places while the rights holder continues to work, chooses other projects or disappears from public life entirely.

For Greta Garbo, whose mythology was built partly on withdrawal, that would be quite a change of program: the exclusive encounter could finally be sold to everyone.