The Age of No Consent Needed

Yesterday, Swedish engineering company SKF released a 99-second advertisement featuring an AI-generated version of Greta Garbo. The film resurrects the actress to promote magnetic bearings, whose purpose is, appropriately enough, to eliminate friction. It was made in cooperation with Garbo’s family and uses a human performance combined with an AI-generated appearance and reconstructed voice.¹

»Would it make a difference if a perfect synthetic version of Garbo won an Oscar or appeared in pornography?«

So far, the response has been about Garbo rather than bearings. Film critic Peter Bradshaw called the digital replica a »Stepford robo-star« and wrote that the advertisement gave us yet another reason to »fear and resent AI«.² But why resent artificial intelligence for something people have chosen to do with it? The machine didn’t decide to resurrect Garbo. Humans commissioned the film, chose the actress, and wrote the words she would say.

The better criticism is that the technology has swallowed the advertisement. The idea has become the message. SKF wanted to tell us about friction. Instead, the entire discussion is about whether Greta Garbo should have been brought back to life.

And there is, in fact, something genuinely unsettling here.

A few years ago, my brother, a hobby genealogist, sent me a few seconds of a heritage-site deepfake of our late grandmother. As far as I know, no moving footage of her exists. The system took a black-and-white photograph and made her turn towards the camera and smile. There was no sound. I knew it was fake. Yet watching those few seconds made me break down in tears.

A photograph preserves an appearance. Moving imagery seems to restore behaviour. Perhaps that’s why the emotional boundary is so strange. We have always represented the dead, but now we can make them appear to come alive again.

Which raises a more difficult question than whether the Garbo in the advertisement appears convincing: who gets to decide what happens to a person’s identity after that person is gone?

Garbo was Swedish, and surprisingly, Swedish law already gives us a partial answer for the living. A 1978 law says that a trader may not use another person’s name or image in advertising without their consent. But the legislation deliberately limits this protection to people who are alive when the advertisement is published. The lawmakers obviously considered the risk of dead people’s names and images being misused insignificant.³

In 1978, that seemed reasonable. A dead actor’s face could appear on a poster, in a magazine, or perhaps in a film. The possibilities were limited. Today, a few photographs, some old recordings, and a model can be enough to manufacture an entirely new performance.

And what exactly are we protecting anyway? Copyright gives a writer rights over something they made. But you don’t make your face. An actor’s performance may be a work, but the actor’s body isn’t necessarily one. A fashion model’s professional work consists largely of being a particular face and body. A person’s voice, gestures, and mannerisms raise the same problem. Can you own a smile? Your way of walking? Your taste in music? A personality has no obvious boundary.

Artist Andy Warhol understood this long before today’s AI. His celebrities were people who had already become images: Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, and yes, Greta Garbo. Garbo was not simply a woman anymore. She was »The Star«.⁴ Marxist theorist Guy Debord famously described a society in which relations between people increasingly become relations mediated by images.⁵ Garbo had already become an image long before she died in 1990. But that image no longer has to remain still. With AI, it can speak, move, and perform.

That changes the question. Would it make a difference if a perfect synthetic version of Garbo won an Oscar or appeared in pornography? If her estate consented, would that settle it? What if, before she died, Garbo had consented or explicitly refused to be digitally resurrected?

We already accept that some rights survive their owners. Copyright in the EU normally lasts for 70 years after an author’s death. A dead person’s work can remain protected long after there’s anyone left to object to what is done with it. But can the actual person remain protected? That’s much less clear. Perhaps this is because a work has boundaries that a person doesn’t.

That we can use AI to resurrect the dead perhaps isn’t that strange. Humans have been resurrecting them in images, stories, films, paintings, statues, biographies, and memories for thousands of years.

The strange thing is that we can now make them do things they never did. And they can’t say no.

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