Actor Jenna Ortega said she deleted X, then known as Twitter, after a “terrifying” experience encountering AI-generated pornographic images of herself on the platform when she was a minor.
In an interview with The New York Times published Saturday, Ortega, 21, reflected on how she feels about artificial intelligence.
“I hate A.I.,” she told the Times, noting that while it “could be used for incredible things,” it has also been abused by some online.
“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,” she said. “It’s terrifying. It’s corrupt. It’s wrong.”
Ortega, one of the stars of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” said that when she was 12 years old, the first direct message she ever opened on her Twitter account was an unsolicited picture of a man’s genitals.
“And that was just the beginning of what was to come,” she said. “I used to have that Twitter account and I was told that, ‘Oh, you got to do it, you got to build your image.”
The influx of “absurd images and photos” got so bad after “Wednesday” came out in 2022 that Ortega decided to delete her account altogether a couple of years back.
“It was disgusting, and it made me feel bad. It made me feel uncomfortable,” she said. “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.”
A spokesperson for Ortega did not immediately respond to a request for comment. X did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Ortega told the Times that she is still learning how to protect herself.
Her concerns point to a growing pattern of nonconsensual AI-generated deepfakes being created and circulated online, mainly because of the rapidly expanding arsenal of AI tools now available for public use.
The sophisticated apps and programs, which “undress,” or “nudify,” photos, and “face-swap” tools that superimpose victims’ faces onto pornographic content have predominantly targeted women and girls.
More nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfake videos were posted last year than in every other year combined, according to independent research from deepfake analyst Genevieve Oh and MyImageMyChoice, an advocacy group for deepfake victims. The research found that Ortega is among the 40 most-targeted celebrity women on the biggest deepfake website.
An app that claimed to be able to undress women using AI ran multiple ads online this year using a manipulated, blurred image of Ortega at 16 years old.
The ads showed how the app, called Perky AI, could change Ortega’s outfit in the photo based on text prompts, including “Latex costume,” “Batman underwear” and, finally, “No clothes.”
Teen actor Xochitl Gomez, known for her role as America Chavez in “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness,” also said in January — when she was still 17 — that she had found nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes of herself on social media and that her team had been unable to get the material taken down.
The same month, Taylor Swift became yet another target of such technology. Nonconsensual deepfakes of her nude and in sexual scenarios went massively viral on X, prompting it to make her name temporarily unsearchable.
But it’s not just celebrities who are targeted. Throughout the past academic year, teen girls in the U.S. have been increasingly victimized by fake nude photos made with AI. And even though some states have enacted legislation to target deepfake pornography, the paths to legal recourse are varied and lack cohesion across the country.
A middle school in California expelled five students in March after they were accused of using generative AI to create and share fake nude images of their classmates — stoking fear among families within the school district. Nude AI-generated deepfakes of students at a New Jersey high school similarly sparked turmoil last year.
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