Jenna Ortega revealed in an interview with The New York Times that she stopped using Twitter after seeing explicit photos of herself generated by artificial intelligence when she was a teenager. She was also inundated with messages from fans ranging from “disgusting” to “ridiculous.”
“I hate AI,” Ortega said. “I mean, here’s the thing: AI can be used for incredible things. I think I saw something the other day where they said AI can detect breast cancer four years before it develops. That’s beautiful. Let’s stick with that. Did I love being 14 and creating a Twitter account because I was supposed to and seeing dirty content edited to me as a kid? No. It’s horrifying. It’s corrupt. It’s wrong.”
Ortega recalled being 12 years old when she received her first direct message from a follower on social media and it was “an unsolicited picture of a man’s genitals, and that was just the beginning of what was to come.”
“I had a Twitter account, and I was told you have to do this, you have to build your image,” Ortega said. “I ended up deleting it two or three years ago because of the influx of ridiculous photos that came out after the show came out, and I was really in such a state of confusion that I just deleted it.”
“It was disgusting, and it made me feel bad. It made me feel uncomfortable,” Ortega continued. “Anyway, that’s why I deleted it, because I couldn’t say anything without seeing something like that. So I woke up one day, and I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t need this anymore.’ So I deleted it.”
Ortega has been making the press rounds recently to promote her role in Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice,” which will open the Venice Film Festival before being released in theaters on September 6 by Warner Bros. Ortega began her acting career as a child actress when she was nine years old, which opened her up to online harassment at an early age.
“There are times when I regret it; there are times when my parents regret it. When I look back, I don’t think I would change anything,” she says of her start in acting as a child. “I don’t believe that because I’m so grateful for the lessons it taught me. I love that when I go on set now, I’m incredibly knowledgeable. I know what the camera language means, I know what the handle does, I know what the director does, I can get along with the director of photography, I can go over shot lists. I understand everything. I know what’s going on around me, so I feel incredibly safe and comfortable and excited to go to work every day because it’s familiar to me.”
Head over to The New York Times to read the full interview with Ortega.
