Jenna Ortega revealed in an interview with The New York Times that she quit Twitter after seeing explicit images of herself generated by artificial intelligence as a teenager. She was also inundated with messages from fans ranging from “disgusting” to “absurd.”
“I hate AI,” Ortega said. “I mean, that’s the thing: AI could be used for incredible things. I think I saw something the other day where they said that artificial intelligence could detect breast cancer four years before it progressed. That’s wonderful. Let’s leave it at that. Did I like opening a Twitter account at 14 because I was supposed to and seeing dirty edited content of myself as a child? No. It’s terrifying. It’s corrupt. It’s wrong.”
Ortega remembers being 12 years old when she received her 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 had this Twitter account and I was told, ‘Oh, you have to do it, you have to build your image,'” Ortega said. “I deleted it about two, three years ago because there was so much going on after the show – these absurd images and photos, and I was already so confused that I just deleted it.”
“It was disgusting and I felt bad. I felt uncomfortable,” Ortega continued. “Anyway, that’s why I deleted it, because I couldn’t say anything without seeing something like that. One day I just woke up and thought, ‘Oh, I don’t need this anymore.’ So I dropped it.”
Ortega has been in the press lately promoting her role in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, which opens the Venice Film Festival before being released by Warner Bros. on Sept. 6. She began her acting career at the age of nine, which left her exposed to online harassment from a young age.
“Sometimes I regret it; sometimes my parents regret it. Looking back, I wouldn’t change anything,” she said of starting her acting career as a child. “I don’t think so, because if anything, I’m incredibly grateful for the lessons it taught me. I love that now when I go on a set, I know an incredible amount. I know what the camera language means, I know what a lighting operator’s job is, I know what a gaffer’s job is, I get along with the DP, I can go through shot lists. I understand everything. I know what’s going on around me, so I feel incredibly confident and comfortable and I look forward to going to work every day because it’s familiar.”
Visit the New York Times website to read Ortega’s latest interview in full.
