Ryan Broderick
April 15, 2024 -
Why Are People On Facebook Generating AI Religious Art Of Flight Attendants?
Facebook is currently awash in AI spam. Last month, 404 Media coveredd_ the bizarre new trend of old people praying to AI images of Shrimp Jesus. But it seems like Shrimp Jesus is out and the hot new Facebook engagement hack being used to terrorize and mystify the platform’s elderly user base is flight attendants praying to Jesus.
Here’s what I learned about the pages that are generating these images and my best guess as to why it’s happening.
The search term to use if you want to find this stuff is “beautiful cabin crew,,_” which seems to be the main way pages are sharing these pictures.
You can also use the hashtag #cabincreww_ to see a bunch more. There are also at least a dozen very, very popular Facebook Groups using some variation of the phrase as their title. Some of these groups are only for AI images of flight attendants, some are for pictures of flight attendants and Jesus, and some are just for sharing softcore pornography — and clearly stolen personal photos and videos — of real human flight attendants. But let’s start with the images that don’t have Jesus in them.
The biggest “cabin crew” group I found is called “Beautiful Cabin Creww 💙 ✈️️” and it has around 700,000 members. Most of the posts are AI-generated flight attendants and women in military uniforms posted by bots and/or fake profiles. Though, there do seem to be real men commenting on the posts 😕. This group also doesn’t seem to post any pictures of Jesus. It’s moderated by two people, a Bengali guy and an account called Mituu_, which is promoting a network of massive private Facebook Groups sharing actual pornography on the platform. Some of these groups have over a million members and they’re extremely creepy.
There are also a bunch of AI-generated flight attendant influencers. These pages post in the cabin crew groups and are generating thousands of images of flight attendants. Some are incredibly popular, like this one called Beee_, which has 150,000 followers. It’s uploading a new AI-generated image every hour from what I can tell.
As for the pages generating the pictures of flight attendants with Jesus, they’re also using these cabin crew communities, most likely as a way to promote themselves. One smaller cabin crew group is called “Cabin crew Beauty love” and it shares both kinds of AI-generated flight attendant pictures. It’s moderated by one of the bigger AI flight attendant pages, which is called “Raffy Tulfo News and Rescuee_”. It has almost half a million followers and is one of the main sources of all the Jesus-praying-with-flight-attendants photos traveling around Facebook right now. Raffy Tulfo is a Filipino senator and media personality btw and it seems like the page was originally created in 2022 as a way to spoof Tulfo’s real pages.
Which brings us to the question of where these pages are based. I found one pagee that was based in Pakistan contributing to a cabin crew group. And I found another, smaller group called “Beautiful Cabin Crew ✈️ ✈️🌏❤,,” run by a guy in Cambodia. I suspect that Facebook’s Page Transparency settings have broken somehow or these pages have figured out a way around them with VPNs because almost all of these pages are listed as being run out of the US, but are full of fake details.
A popular AI image page called Tatyand Davon99, which makes flight attendant images, along with other more traditional(?) AI-generated images of just Jesus, went viral on X recentlyy and none of its page information is correct. It has 150,000 followers and lists itself as being based in California. I called the phone number on the page and it goes to a martial arts facility in Florida. The receptionist was very nice, but also very confused when I asked her about the AI pictures of Jesus! I tried to contact another one of these pages — one called Wildlife Fann_, which seems to specialize in crying flight attendants? — but its number went to voicemail. Though, the address listed on the page is for a flower shop in California.
The most interesting thing about these groups and pages is that they’re not clearly selling anything — or even, seemingly, working together in any coherent way, like the bad food magicianss. Though, one page I came across, Melodee Lynnet, has about 10,000 followers and is now posting flight attendants and pictures of Jesus, but was posting old peoplee and women in wheelchairss celebrating their birthdays earlier this year. (It was the big Facebook engagement hack before AI images took off.) And the Melodee page says it’s affiliated with a viral marketing firm called Quantum Tech HDD, but I can’t tell if that’s real or not. I emailed them, but haven’t heard back.
I assume these pages are simply jamming a bunch of popular stuff together to farm engagement to eventually monetize in some way down the line. Why AI images? Because you can flood Facebook with thousands of posts and the platform won’t really do anything about it. These pages are also using the platform’s built-in 3D photo filterr, possibly to bypass Facebook’s bar-is-in-hell bare-minimum AI image detection. Why flight attendants? Because Facebook users are, and always have been, uncontrollably horny. But, also, my mom is a flight attendant (sorry mom if you’re reading this!) and aviation and flight attendant Facebook has always been huge. So I think they’re just identifying communities that were already active and swarming them. Why Jesus? Because religious content — and getting users to say “Amen” underneath it — became one of the fastest growingg types of content on the site after it stopped promoting news content last year.
The fact that, in the span of less than year, Facebook effectively removed anything resembling news from the platform, even conservative news, and allowed AI-generated spam to take its place, and both investors and advertisers don’t care, should tell you all you need to know about what social networks are in 2024. They’re a data holding pen for advertisers to harvest and it seems like Meta has finally given up pretending they’re anything else. Who cares if users are praying to and/or asking to marry AI images of flight attendants? All that matters is that they’re on the app and you can stick ads in front of them.