"I want to be alone." The despairing words spoken by Greta Garbo while being spied on by a thief in her 1932 film Grand Hotel, have been injected with chilling new irony. Using the latest AI technique, the starlet has been brought back to life to flog ball bearings in an advert by the industrial Swedish Company SKF. And what a terrifying spectacle it makes.
The lifelike precision is terrific, from the smoky, undulating voice to the thin pencilled eyebrows that twitch between anxiety and hauteur.
At the same time there is something deathly about the figment. What made Garbo so brilliant to watch was that you didn't know where the woman started and the character began; when the camera was rolling she didn't so much perform as emerge. Her AI rendition has magnetism without presence.
True, the animation deploys cutting-edge AI techniques to evade successfully what is known as the "uncanny valley" trap, the nausea that people feel when faced with simulations that nearly – but do not quite – resemble real humans. But simulations like Greta's arguably occupy a new ******* e that one might call the "immaculate void".
Garbo's family gave their permission for the ad. But it's impossible to know how Garbo herself would have felt about it. As we extract commercial value from the departed without their consent, it begs the question: are we any better than Egyptian grave robbers, who sacrilegiously plundered the dead?
#greta #grand
The lifelike precision is terrific, from the smoky, undulating voice to the thin pencilled eyebrows that twitch between anxiety and hauteur.
At the same time there is something deathly about the figment. What made Garbo so brilliant to watch was that you didn't know where the woman started and the character began; when the camera was rolling she didn't so much perform as emerge. Her AI rendition has magnetism without presence.
True, the animation deploys cutting-edge AI techniques to evade successfully what is known as the "uncanny valley" trap, the nausea that people feel when faced with simulations that nearly – but do not quite – resemble real humans. But simulations like Greta's arguably occupy a new ******* e that one might call the "immaculate void".
Garbo's family gave their permission for the ad. But it's impossible to know how Garbo herself would have felt about it. As we extract commercial value from the departed without their consent, it begs the question: are we any better than Egyptian grave robbers, who sacrilegiously plundered the dead?
#greta #grand
2 hours ago
