Greta Garbo returning to the screen to sell ball bearings is the sort of sentence that makes you realise everything is now kinda warped into a whole new realm.
And yet here we are: 99 seconds of ice-blue stare, the bob, the cadence - all in service of friction, waste, and the noble cause of keeping machines spinning a bit more efficiently. If you’re SKF, makers of said ball bearings, it’s a tidy centenary loop. If you’re the rest of us, it’s a useful little warning light on the dashboard.
Because it's not just that they're involved in (here's today's new word, children:) 'ghostspoitaltion'. It’s how they did it without touching the thing you’d assume is essential: her films.
Her films are copyrighted, so the production sidestepped the obvious training data. No frame-by-frame feeding of Queen Christina into a model. Instead: text prompts to image/video generators (Seedream and Nano Banana Pro), a human performer doing the physical work, and an AI face laid over the top. The voice, apparently, is anchored to an early recording - which is its own separate rights-and-ethics rabbit hole. The result is a new kind of replica: not “copied from” so much as “conjured adjacent to”.
That’s the rub. Copyright has always been a blunt instrument for the modern digital world, but generative AI has found a particularly sharp edge: you can rebuild a recognisable person from description alone. Copyright protects a specific work. It doesn’t protect the idea of Garbo, or the generalisable features that make a face feel like a face you already know. So we’re drifting into a world where the best legal advice may amount to: “Don’t worry, we didn’t nick your assets - we just recreated the vibe.”
If you run a property business, you can feel the shape of where this goes next.
For agents, it’s the temptation to smooth away every bit of mess in the marketing process: a slightly dreary sky, a tired lawn, a vendor who hates photos, a video voiceover that sounds like it was recorded inside a biscuit tin. “Friction” in the Garbo script is industrial energy loss; in ours it’s the drag of reality resisting the perfectly-packaged listing.
And reality is doing plenty of dragging at the moment. Zoopla this week says that a quarter of this month’s new listings have already been on once. That's the market telling you where the cost sits: price discovery that took too long, instructions won with over-confidence, presentation that didn’t land, buyer qualification that wasn’t tight enough, chains that snapped, or a vendor who discovered the gap between what they want and what the market will fund. Relisting is (ball-beearing-free) friction made visible.
AI can reduce that friction brilliantly - sharper pricing conversations, better matching, cleaner comms, more consistent follow-up, vendor updates that actually say something. But Garbo’s bearings advert also shows the darker twin: AI can reduce the friction of deception as well. If a famous face can be rebuilt without “using” the original, then a kitchen can be rebuilt without admitting it never looked that way, a view can be rebuilt without mentioning the pylons, and a “lifestyle” reel can be rebuilt without a lifestyle existing anywhere near the property.
Garbo wanted to be alone; now she’s got two AI models, a body double and a manufacturer. The property version is already here: one negotiator, one CRM, one portal feed, one AI content engine, and a thin layer of synthetic polish over the top. The winners won’t be the firms who generate the most convincing unreality. They’ll be the ones who use these tools openly, to remove genuine waste - and keep the one thing AI can’t manufacture at scale: trust.