Jenna Ortega revealed she deleted her Twitter account after receiving AI-generated pornographic DMs of herself as a child.
In an interview with the New York Times, the actress discussed her experiences growing up in the spotlight and navigating her identity as a young woman in Hollywood, while discussing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the second season of Netflix‘s Wednesday.
Also speaking about her forthcoming project, an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro‘s novel Klara and the Sun helmed by Taika Waititi in which she plays the eponymous robot, Ortega remarked that her experience with artificial intelligence has been “terrifying.”
“I hate AI,” she said. “I mean, here’s the thing: AI could be used for incredible things. I think I saw something the other day where they were saying that artificial intelligence was able to detect breast cancer four years before it progressed. That’s beautiful. Let’s keep it to that. Did I like being 14 and making a Twitter account because I was supposed to and seeing dirty edited content of me as a child? No. It’s terrifying. It’s corrupt. It’s wrong.”
In addition to receiving AI-generated pornographic images, the the Scream star said the first DM she opened by herself at age 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 that Twitter account and I was told that, ‘Oh, you got to do it, you got to build your image,’” Jenna Ortega said. “I ended up deleting it about two, three years ago because the influx after the show [Wednesday] had come out — these absurd images and photos, and I already was in a confused state that I just deleted it.”
At 21 years old, Ortega also revealed that she manages life in the spotlight, and the inevitable online presence, by spending time offline and outdoors, and by being less judgmental of herself.
“I’m always walking,” she said. “If you’re ever wondering what I’m doing, if my parents are ever wondering, if I’m not at work, or in some sort of meeting, I am outside doing laps. I am in a random garden, I am laying, taking a nap in a field.”
“I’m really working on not being so self-critical or just killing myself over things that in the grand scheme of the world with the news and things you see, it’s really just not important at all.”