Jenna Ortega revealed in an interview with The New York Times that she quit Twitter after seeing explicit AI-generated images of herself as a teenager, and was inundated with messages from fans that ranged from “gross” to “ridiculous.”
“I hate AI,” Ortega said. “AI could be used for amazing things. I think I saw the other day that AI could detect breast cancer four years before it developed. That's amazing. Let's just leave it at that. Would I have created a Twitter account at 14 because I had to, and loved looking at dirty edited content of myself as a child? No. It's horrifying. It's corrupting. It's wrong.”
Ortega recalled that he was 12 years old when he received his first direct message from a social media follower. “It was an unsolicited photo of a man's genitals and that was just the beginning of what was to come.”
“I used to have a Twitter account, and people were like, 'Yeah, go ahead and create your own image,'” Ortega says. “I ended up deleting it a couple of years ago because after the show, I was getting so many crazy images and pictures and it was just crazy, so I deleted it.”
“It was gross, it made me feel bad, it made me uncomfortable,” Ortega continued. “Anyway, that's why I deleted it. Because I couldn't say anything without seeing that stuff. I just woke up one day and was like, 'Oh, I don't need this anymore,' so I deleted it.”
Ortega recently made the rounds at press events promoting her role in Tim Burton's “Beetlejuice,” which opened the Venice Film Festival and is due to be released in theaters on September 6th by Warner Bros. She began her acting career at age 9, which led to her being subjected to online harassment at an early age.
“Sometimes I regret it, and sometimes my parents regret it. Looking back, I wouldn't change anything,” she said about beginning her acting career as a child. “I don't believe in it. If anything, I'm very grateful for the lessons I learned from that experience. Now, when I go on set, I'm so happy that I'm so knowledgeable. I know what the camera terms mean, I know what a grip's job is, I know what a gaffer's job is, I get on well with the cinematographer, I can go through the shot list. I understand it all. I know what's going on around me, so I feel very safe and comfortable, and I look forward to going to work every day because it's familiar.”
To read the full latest interview with Ortega, visit the New York Times website.
