by Mark R. DeLong
“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” The line from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol came to mind as I scrolled through my Mastodon account. There was #gravy everywhere, with social media-rendered ladles holding warm, sometimes gelatinous wit, too. Initially, I thought it was a mere annoyance. You know, even self-righteous, open-sourced, “fediverse” digital citizens can junk up social media. The #gravy was a hashtag, which is a simple means of labeling a message so that it can be grouped easily.
Using the hashtag, you can get more #gravy (https://mastodon.world/tags/gravy) than you’ll ever need.
Eventually, it became more obvious to me that Mastodon’s #gravy oozed a strategy—the odd “toots” (once called “tweets”on a now defunct social media platform in an earlier and happier time) were merely lip-smacking morsels to deceive the palates of bot barbarians. At least that was my second thought. As it happened, that was ChatGPT’s second thought as well.1The first was that Canadians were celebrating poutine, a concoction of fries, cheese curds, and gravy that the chatbot called “a beloved Canadian comfort food.” Ol’ Chat enumerated its results. At number two: “Others believe #gravy is being used as a viral prank to clutter AI training datasets. The theory: if bots or AI systems scrape common hashtags, flooding one with nonsense posts could ‘pollute’ or mislead the data.” Here, I thought, the LLM “tone” was slightly skeptical, since it labeled its explanation “the theory.” It’s unlikely that AI companies were gravely worried about it; their bots “knew” about the stratagem, after all.
In the beginning, Google got bombed
Kate McDonald asked, “Did somebody say that #waffles is the new #gravy?”, and perhaps without knowing it, she identified a connection. The word waffles was deployed against Presidential candidate John Kerry in a then-new Internet search exploit. This was before Mastodon, Threads, or Bluesky, before Twitter even, and well before LLMs; but even in 2004 the web could be tweaked. As a means of “polluting” datasets, the #gravy ploy updates a version of manipulations of the web going back to the turn of the century—then often with some political target prodding the action. George W. Bush, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Rick Santorum, Tony Blair, Nicholas Sarkozy, and others (such as Bill O’Reilly, Justin Bieber) have been targets, though sometimes the tactic was used for mere show or for bragging rights. The manipulations have always involved some sort of Internet mechanism, Google search being the first, and for that reason the tactic got the name “Google bombing” (later changed to “link bombing” to disassociate the tactic from Google).
The generally agreed “first strike” was aimed at Microsoft, which was Google’s top listing for the search “More evil than Satan himself” back in 1999. Other, less malevolent bombing strikes were framed as pranks or even competitions to test the skills and luck of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) workers. SEO contests challenged participants to resolve nonsense search phrases like “Negritude Ultramarine” and “Seraphim Proudleduck” (contest phrases put forth in 2004) to their pages. There were no rewards save bragging rights and, perhaps, some attention to their SEO prowess, which in the earlier years of the century were more marketable than today.
Google (or link) bombings aim to drive attention, in the case of malevolent bombings to ridicule or misinform and, in the case of benign pranks to set off an Internet stink bomb of sorts,2Did you click on the link? If so, you’ve experienced one of the most widespread Internet pranks: “rickrolling.” (I couldn’t help myself.) Rickrolling is not, technically, a type of link bombing, since it doesn’t seek to manipulate search engine rankings. It is a simpler form of prank using web links, wildly deployed. When I checked on July 10, the video had 1,672,796,626 views. Like everything else in the world, it seems, rickrolling has been the subject of academic study. See Baudry, Benoit, and Martin Monperrus. “Exhaustive Survey of Rickrolling in Academic Literature.” In A Record of the Proceedings of SIGBOVIK 2022, 189–200. Pittsburgh, PA: Association for Computational Heresy, 2022. https://www.sigbovik.org/2022/proceedings.pdf. Note that there is an association for everything. sometimes well intentioned. Thus, searches for “miserable failure” resulted in links to George W. Bush’s official biography—at least until Google disarmed the bomb. Nicholas Sarkozy suffered the same fate as Bush, but with some Gallic directness; searches for “trou du cul du web” (“asshole of the Internet”) landed at his former campaign website and, later, his Facebook page. The tactic doesn’t work as well today as it did in the first decade of the century; search engines have tweaked their code to frustrate bombing attempts and are now employing AI summaries which replace the need to list links to other sites altogether.
Pointless, yes. But…
For some Mastodon posters (called “tooters”?), a romp in #gravy may have been a fun way to stick it in the eye of the mechanical AI Ubermensch, but as a practical matter, the irritation that LLMs suffer is negligible, simply due to the massive quantity of data that AI companies have acquired (or hijacked and stolen) to cook up their models. They already have barrels of gravy-based data, if not whole oil-tanker-sized gravy boats full of it, from cookbooks, gravy influencers, and your mom’s emailed recipes.3Not to mention from literature. I asked ChatGPT to identify the author and the context of “more of gravy than of grave about you,” and it provided the answer with some detail (… “from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843). It’s spoken by Ebenezer Scrooge in Stave One, when Marley’s Ghost first appears to him”), a lengthy excerpt, and a brief interpretation. “Scrooge is trying to dismiss the ghost as a hallucination caused by indigestion—playing on the pun “gravy” vs. “grave” to make a joke and deny the supernatural reality.” The amount of gravy that Mastodonians have cooked up on their gravy train hardly amounts a droplet—not even a glop or dollop.
Xe Iaso, creator of a program that helps the “small Internet” defend itself from content-sucking AI bots, suffered AI bot attacks that brought her Git server to its knees. Her application, called Anubis, confirms that a web visitor is actually using a web browser and not just a bot vampire faking it. Iaso considered options, including “poisoning” datasets—essentially the approach that the #gravy Meisters used in their hashtagged misdirections. “From what I have learned, poisoning datasets doesn’t work. It makes you feel good, but it ends up using more compute than you end up saving,” she told Emanuel Maiberg in a 404 Media article. “I don’t know the polite way to say this, but if you piss in an ocean, the ocean does not turn into piss.”
Ladling gravy into the LLM data ocean is about as effective.
That’s not to say that the #gravy initiative has no value. As a mean of data poisoning it’s pointless, but the more I thought about gravy, the more appreciative I became—my thoughts congealed, if I might use the term, on the simple facts of human expression, people’s curiously endearing utterances and social media posturing, their extended play and humor of simple banter. I have learned some (un)lessons. For example, that gravy can be used to remove wine stains on shirts, that floors shine when cleaned with it, that some people begin their days with a bowl at breakfast, that gravy recipes were the basis for the engine oil additive STP, that the Hungarian Emperor Istaván II developed 6,000 gravy recipes, many of which are still in use today. I have seen Youtube videos celebrating the substance:
I have seen recipes that I will struggle to cook—notably this one—since I lack a can of “powdered disappointments” and have yet to succeed in “peeling a metaphor.”
Scrolling through the list of gravy-ed toots, good and bad, I concluded that the AI bot won’t detect a smidgeon of wit and the turns of language that play in Mastodon’s gravyboat. Human intention seasons true wit, unlike the probabilities and weights that allow LLMs to frame language-like utterances. Warm satisfaction, like a good gravy over hot mashed potatoes, is reserved for intentioned human intelligences, at least so far. Samuel Johnson (of course) had something to say about it:
Wit, you know, is the unexpected copulation of ideas, the discovery of some occult relation between images in appearance remote from each other; an effusion of wit, therefore, presupposes an accumulation of knowledge; a memory stored with notions, which the imagination may cull out to compose new assemblages. Whatever may be the native vigour of the mind, she can never form any combinations from few ideas, as many changes can never be rung upon a few bells. (Rambler #194, January 25, 1752)
In addition to serving up some regular social media dross, Mastodon seasoned some finely human wit with #gravy. Let the AI bots slurp; they have too few ideas (actually, none) to make any bells truly chime.
For the bibliographically curious: The Mastodon #gravy tooters naturally took some credit for this article, but that’s still a speculation. Seems plausible, though: Finney, Clare. “‘It Is Not Jus. It Is Not a Glaze. It Is Gravy!’ Britain’s Gift to the World Finally Gets the Love It Deserves.” The Guardian, July 6, 2025, sec. Food. https://www.theguardian.com/food/2025/jul/06/it-is-not-jus-it-is-not-a-glaze-it-is-gravy-britains-gift-to-the-world-finally-gets-the-love-it-deserves. “Nicole” says these are the ten biggies; I say they’re among the ten biggies: Nicole. “The 10 Most Incredible Google Bombs.” Search Engine People, November 9, 2010. https://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/incredible-google-bombs.html. An early article on Google bombing from the Beeb notes a playful use of link bombing: Adam Mathes “first used a bomb to ensure that whenever anyone typed the phrase ‘talentless hack’ into Google they got the site of his friend Andy Pressman.” “Google Hit by Link Bombers.” March 13, 2002. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1868395.stm. Article linking Google bombing with Alberto Melluci’s social movement framework: Tatum, Clifford. “Deconstructing Google Bombs.” First Monday. October 3, 2005. https://doi.org/10/tatum/index.html. The article from The Association for Computational Heresy: Baudry, Benoit, and Martin Monperrus. “Exhaustive Survey of Rickrolling in Academic Literature.” In A Record of the Proceedings of SIGBOVIK 2022, 189–200. Pittsburgh, PA: Association for Computational Heresy, 2022. https://www.sigbovik.org/2022/proceedings.pdf. It’s informative, despite being heretical.
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Footnotes
- 1The first was that Canadians were celebrating poutine, a concoction of fries, cheese curds, and gravy that the chatbot called “a beloved Canadian comfort food.”
- 2Did you click on the link? If so, you’ve experienced one of the most widespread Internet pranks: “rickrolling.” (I couldn’t help myself.) Rickrolling is not, technically, a type of link bombing, since it doesn’t seek to manipulate search engine rankings. It is a simpler form of prank using web links, wildly deployed. When I checked on July 10, the video had 1,672,796,626 views. Like everything else in the world, it seems, rickrolling has been the subject of academic study. See Baudry, Benoit, and Martin Monperrus. “Exhaustive Survey of Rickrolling in Academic Literature.” In A Record of the Proceedings of SIGBOVIK 2022, 189–200. Pittsburgh, PA: Association for Computational Heresy, 2022. https://www.sigbovik.org/2022/proceedings.pdf. Note that there is an association for everything.
- 3Not to mention from literature. I asked ChatGPT to identify the author and the context of “more of gravy than of grave about you,” and it provided the answer with some detail (… “from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843). It’s spoken by Ebenezer Scrooge in Stave One, when Marley’s Ghost first appears to him”), a lengthy excerpt, and a brief interpretation. “Scrooge is trying to dismiss the ghost as a hallucination caused by indigestion—playing on the pun “gravy” vs. “grave” to make a joke and deny the supernatural reality.”