Jenna Ortega talks about her experience with the negative aspects of artificial intelligence.
During a recent conversation on The New York Times podcast “The Interview,” the Wednesday star recalled an unpleasant experience he had on social media as a teenager that led him to close his Twitter (now known as X) account.
“I hate AI,” she said. “When you were 14, you made a Twitter account because you had to, and you loved looking at salacious edited content of yourself as a child? No. AI is scary. AI is corrupt. AI is wrong.”
As well as seeing AI-generated pornographic images of herself as a teenager, she said, “the first direct message I ever opened on my own, when I was 12, 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 explained. “I ended up deleting it a couple of years ago because after my Wednesday show, I started seeing a ton of crazy images and pictures and it was just crazy, so I deleted it.”
The Beetlejuice actress said the “nasty” photo left her “sick” and “uncomfortable,” adding, “That's why I deleted it. Because there's no way I could say anything without seeing this. I just woke up one day and was like, Oh, I don't need this anymore. So I deleted it.”
Ortega, 21, acknowledged that she is still learning how to protect herself, especially in a profession where she is under surveillance most of the time. One thing that has helped her is to “avoid the phone as much as possible.”
“I'm always walking,” she says. “If I'm not at work or in a meeting wondering if my parents are wondering what I'm doing, I'm outside taking a walk. I'm in a garden somewhere, lying down in a field, taking a nap.”
The Scream 6 actress added, “I'm really trying not to beat myself up or kill myself over things that really don't matter in the grand scheme of the world, like the news and things that I see. I should be having so much fun right now. So much fun! But I'm not. I should be. And I'm trying to remind myself of that.”
