Jenna Ortega Quit Twitter Due to Disgusting Fan Messages, AI Images of Her

Jenna Ortega revealed in an interview with The New York Times that she quit Twitter after seeing explicit images of herself generated by AI when she was a teenager. She also became inundated with messages from fans that ranged from “disgusting” to “absurd.”

“I hate AI,” Ortega 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.”

Ortega remembered she was 12 years old when she got her first direct message from a follower on social media and it “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,’” Ortega said. “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.”

“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 one day I just woke up, and I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t need this anymore.’ So I dropped it.”

Ortega has been making the press rounds recently in support of her role in Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” which is opening the Venice Film Festival before releasing in theaters Sept. 6 from Warner Bros. She got her acting start as a child at age 9, which opened her up to online harassment at a young age.

“There’s times that I regret it; there’s times that my parents regret it. Looking back, I wouldn’t change anything,” she said about starting her acting career as a kid. “I don’t believe in that because if anything, I’m incredibly grateful for the lessons that it did teach me. I love that when I go on a set now, I’m incredibly knowledgeable. I know what the camera verbiage means, I know what a grip’s job is, I know what a gaffer’s job is, I can get along with the D.P., I can go through shot lists. I understand it all. I know what’s going on around me, therefore 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’ website to read Ortega’s latest interview in its entirety.