Swedish-American actor exhumed for bizarre, humourless 99 seconds that give us another reason to resent AI

Poor Greta Garbo.

Perhaps, in life, she thought her final indignity would be the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore TV sketch from 1970, showing Pete as the legendary recluse standing on the back of a flatbed truck as it rumbles through the crowded city streets, shouting at everyone through a megaphone: “I vant to be alone!”

But now, 36 years after her death in 1990, there is something worse. As if to give us yet another reason to fear and resent AI, this technology has exhumed Garbo and brought her to a state of bland, mediocre undeadness for a bizarre 99-second TV ad from the Swedish ball-bearings company Svenska Kullagerfabriken (SKF), in which the screen legend, dressed in a silk blouse and stylish slacks, key-lit like a movie star, at first in dreamy profile-silhouette and then standing by a stool and prefacing her script by saying movie-type things like “Are we rolling?”, drones out her appreciation for this very boring industrial product. At the end, we get an odd, stilted sort of joke about her well-known yearning for solitude.

There is a reason for it. In 1921, the 15-year-old future screen icon, then known as Greta Gustafsson, really did briefly appear in a promotional film for SKF. (This appears to have been an offshoot for the women’s clothing commercials she was doing at the time for Stockholm’s PUB department store, which got her into the movies.)

The AI Greta Garbo is a bizarre soignée figure, a Stepford robo-star, a Hallmark-greeting-card parody of the icy hauteur, distraite sensuality and deadpan comedy that Garbo projected in life. The AI Garbo is like the classiest ever presenter of a TV shopping channel, purring her way through a dull and humourless script that seeks to create a brand synergy between the frictionless ball-bearings manufactured by SKF and what the company imagines to be Garbo’s own all-important smoothness. But Garbo’s impact rested on something other than smoothness. “One of my first films was for SKF and now I’m back for my last,” AI Greta remarks.

Let’s hope this dull AI Garbo is not the way of the future. Guardrails were never more badly needed.