Jenna Ortega Deletes Twitter After Receiving Explicit AI Messages

Jenna Ortega revealed she deleted her Twitter account after receiving AI-generated pornographic messages portraying her as a child.

Speaking to the New York Times ahead of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the second season of Netflix’s Wednesday, the actress talked about growing up in the spotlight and defining her identity as a young woman in Hollywood. Discussing her upcoming project, an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun directed by Taika Waititi, in which she plays a robot named Klara, Ortega shared that her experience with artificial intelligence has been horrifying.

“I hate AI,” she confessed. “Here’s the thing: AI could be used for incredible things. I think I saw something recently where they said artificial intelligence could detect breast cancer four years before it develops. That’s amazing. Let’s keep it to that. Did I enjoy being 14, creating a Twitter account because I had to, and then seeing doctored explicit content of me as a child? Absolutely not. It’s terrifying. It’s corrupt. It’s wrong.”

When prompted by the interviewer, the Scream star shared that the first direct message she received at age 12 was “an unsolicited photo of a man’s genitals, and that was just the beginning.”

The Emmy-nominated performer continued, “I had that Twitter account and was told, ‘You have to do it, you have to build your image.’ I deleted it two, three years ago because after the show came out, there was an influx of these absurd images and photos. Already confused, I decided to just delete it.”

She added, “It was disgusting, and it made me feel terrible. It made me uncomfortable. That’s why I deleted it. I couldn’t say anything without seeing something like that. One day, I woke up and thought, ‘I don’t need this anymore.’ So, I dropped it.”

According to the Washington Post, the barrier to creating realistic AI porn (deepfake pornography) is lower than ever, with women being the primary targets of these manipulated images. This issue has plagued Twitch streamers and even celebrities like Taylor Swift, although laws regulating AI usage are still lagging.

Source: New York Times, Washington Post