A fashion brand has turned Frida Kahlo into the star of a viral AI-generated advertisement in which the artist, who was disabled in a bus crash a century ago, drives a bus recklessly through Paris. The ad, by Les Énervés, a label with roots in Paris and Bali, was first posted to Instagram in October and began spreading widely on X this month, drawing accusations that it disrespects the dead.

In the film, a bubblegum-chewing Kahlo gets behind the wheel of a bus carrying the Mona Lisa and Vincent van Gogh, and downs several drinks before driving off, as the soundtrack switches from Édith Piaf to Britney Spears. The brand's founder, Wakim Krari, directed the piece, which the label says was produced using AI and a lot of patience. The brand presents the film as a statement of reclamation, saying that a hundred years later Kahlo is the one driving and nothing will hit her this time.

The joke lands badly because of what the bus means in Kahlo's life. In 1925, aged 18, she was riding a bus that collided with a trolley, an accident that severely injured her pelvis, abdomen and uterus and left her in lifelong pain. She took up painting during the long recovery. One post on X calling the ad disrespectful to the dead has drawn 46,000 likes. The film is far from the first AI project to rework Kahlo: another video circulating on TikTok and X recasts her as a Spice Girl, singing alongside the Mona Lisa.

The episode feeds a wider argument about Kahlo's image, which appears on products from Barbie dolls to tequila bottles. Mari Carmen Ramírez, curator of "Frida: The Making of an Icon", now at Tate Modern in London, has said Kahlo's image has become subsumed by artists and activists, for better and worse. The concern is not only commercial: AI can distort and disregard art history, recasting an artist who carefully fashioned her own self-image into whatever a brand wants her to be. Les Énervés has already promised a next chapter with a new muse.