The Swedish industrial group SKF launched a global advertising campaign on 30 September 2026 in which artificial intelligence recreates the Hollywood star Greta Garbo, who died in 1990, to promote its magnetic bearing solutions. SKF says that before she became famous Garbo appeared in a film promoting Swedish industry to an international audience, with SKF among the companies featured, and that the project was developed in collaboration with Garbo's family and Harriet Brown & Company Inc. According to Reuters, SKF said that because of copyright issues the Garbo likeness was not made from archival photographs or footage but created with text prompts, while the voice was trained on her voice from one of her early films, the only archival material fed to the AI, for which permission was obtained, with a human actor helping with pacing and cadence.
The advert raises the question of which rights a brand needs before a deceased star can say on screen words she never said.
The case shows that a person's identity, such as name, appearance and voice, and the materials in which the person appears, such as old photographs, film clips and historical recordings, raise two separate sets of rights: a licence for a film clip or recording does not by itself allow the person to be shown recommending a new product, and a licence for the person's likeness does not by itself cover every work in which the person appeared.
Even where images are newly generated by AI without uploading old photographs, the rights relating to the person still need to be assessed separately whenever the commercial content points to an identifiable real person. In China, Article 994 of the Civil Code provides that where the name, likeness or reputation of a deceased person is infringed, the close relatives are entitled to request the infringer to bear civil liability.
The Supreme People's Court's Opinions on hearing disputes involving artificial intelligence, issued on 7 September 2026, further state that where AI is used without authorisation to create or use a virtual digital likeness of a deceased person so that the person's name, likeness or reputation is infringed, the courts will support close relatives' claims under that article.
Once use of a likeness is permitted, the advert itself must still meet the requirement of truthfulness and cannot use a digital likeness to invent a deceased person's experience of a new product; labelling content as AI-generated explains how it was made, and does not replace authorisation for the person and the materials.
Source: www.prnewswire.com | www.yahoo.com | www.court.gov.cn
