There's a magical place of intrigue and mystery in the backroads of Tennessee. Where else could Ozzy Osbourne work as a Hot Dog Manager, Luigi Mangione be on the employee list, Gary Busey be named Trucker of the Month, and an Amy Schumer lookalike break the internet?
While the Celina 52 Truck Stop is very much a place you can visit, it's not quite as simple as that. Posts often include people who work at the Eco Travel Plaza, which was exposed as the 'real' Celina 52 thanks to internet detectives doing some digging.
After exploding in popularity thanks to its tongue-in-cheek posts about everything from rodents nibbling customers' genitals to Elmo stealing a rotisserie chicken, Celina 52 has amassed 567,000 followers on Facebook. The truck stop is the brainchild of Howard (he doesn't want his surname out there), who concocted the idea after the Weaber Valley Speedway went viral as a dirt track racing parody.
As Howard has already explained, "Almost everything is real in some way." Having taken over 2,000 images at the Eco Travel Plaza, some Photoshop wizardry creates the unhinged antics that we can't get enough of, although Howard admits there is some occasional use of AI.
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The team has gone live several times to try and prove their existence, with them even shelling out on an eight-foot mascot costume for the brilliantly marketable P*ss Jugman. Still, Howard and the rest regularly bat off complaints that everything we see is artificial intelligence, and they themselves aren't even real.
UNILADTech got the scoop from the man himself, who explained: "AI is used occasionally for small elements, but the core of what you see are real photos. A lot of the stuff we post are things that happen in reality, and our page is just an exaggerated version of everyday occurrences in a truck stop (p*ss jugs are very real, and not even the worst thing you see)."
It seems that some will never believe that Celina 52 is 'real' in any way, and for those who think everything is AI, Howard has a message for you.
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Asking skeptics to look a little closer, Howard reiterates: "I say to look through our page for more than a couple of posts or check our videos tab. Our photos are too coherent and legible to be AI, and the captions are always written by me, a presumed human."
As for those who think their live videos are 'deepfaked' despite responding to comments in real time, he added: "It's like they can't comprehend that some idiot would buy an 8-foot tall P*ss Jugman suit and walk around a truck stop parking lot picking up jugs of pee with it (okay, maybe I get it, but that's exactly what I did).
"I spend dozens of hours a week creating posts, so getting dismissed as ‘AI’ is frustrating. If someone thinks our stuff is AI, we invite them to come to the truck stop, meet the people in the photos, and watch how we create the posts in real life."
Howard reminds us that he's physically at the Eco Travel Plaza taking photographs, the majority of the people who work there can be met in-person, and AI isn't quite as sophisticated as you might think: "AI still struggles with detailed backgrounds and often has that ‘AI Look’, which isn't found in our photos."
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Saying that Photoshop is far more tedious than AI, he continues: "If we can't get the desired output in a raw, unedited photo, we will then use Photoshop or AI to partially edit the photo, but the base photo is almost always real."
With AI continuing to evolve, Howard has his own thoughts about where things are heading. Admitting that AI has made it harder for people to figure out what's real, he concluded: "Unfortunately, that means a lot of people write off our page without realizing we were doing this long before AI images were anything close to believable."
He’s defensive about Celina 52 "because I know how much time and effort go into making these real-life scenes happen."
There was a brief period in mid-2024 when they experimented with wholly AI-generated images, although they moved away from it. In Howard's mind, "AI content can devalue the creativity of actually going outside and creating legitimate content that makes people laugh."
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Even as AI grows, Celina 52 vows to keep doing what it's doing: "AI will keep evolving, and in a year even I (someone who uses AI daily) might not be able to tell what’s real in some cases, but I still believe the most meaningful content is grounded in reality.
"Something absurd, but believable enough to get a genuine laugh from people who see it and think 'that should never happen, but it could'."