Jenna Ortega revealed she deleted her Twitter account after receiving AI-generated pornographic DMs of herself as a child.
Speaking to the New York Times in advance of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the second season of Netflix‘s Wednesday, the actress reflected on growing up in the spotlight and navigating her identity as a young woman in Hollywood. While 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.”
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Expanding when prompted by the interviewer, 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.”
The Emmy-nominated performer continued, “I used to have that Twitter account and I was told that, ‘Oh, you got to do it, you got to build your image.’ I ended up deleting it about two, three years ago because the influx after the show had come out — these absurd images and photos, and I already was in a confused state that I just deleted it.”
She added, “It was disgusting, and it made me feel bad. It made me feel uncomfortable. Anyway, that’s why I deleted it, because I couldn’t say anything without seeing something like that. So one day I just woke up, and I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t need this anymore.’ So I dropped it.”
Per the Washington Post, the barrier to making realistic AI porn (called deepfake pornography) is lower than ever and is of particular concern to women, who are often targeted by and harassed with manipulated and false imagery. The problem has affected Twitch streamers and even stars like Taylor Swift, though laws regulating AI usage have lagged.
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