¶Are you a robot? If you’re not, you’re going to be pretty sure you’re not. Still, online at least, you likely find it difficult to tell who else is and is not. Businesses find this difficult, too, and it’s getting harder all the time. If you were forced to guess, the odds would tell you to guess robot, because at this point there are more bots online than people. To deal with this problem, businesses retain bot-detection and bot-management firms, a specialty within the field of cybersecurity. Their task used to be to block bots, but, with the rise of agentic A.I., that has changed. Now the problem is how to let in the good bots (like the avatar you send to the Gap to buy you a new pair of pants) and keep out the bad bots (like the thief trying to scrape the data of every Gap customer). The rest of us have to be our own bot detectors.

¶Bot detection used to be literally that. Detect bots. If bot, block.

¶AI has changed the detection game, though. More specifically, the rise of agentic AI is forcing the game to change, and that is literally just getting underway. Today’s bot detection has a new layer — determining the type of bot. If bot, determine type, block if bad.

¶We humans aren’t being pushed out of the internet yet, but we’re certainly losing its attention.

¶BTW, I have no idea how The New Yorker missed an opportunity to include a reference to its prophetic 1993 “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” cartoon. The omission of this obvious tieback is a pretty good indicator that AI wasn’t involved in writing the article, though. So there’s that.

¶The app will now include an AI-powered, citation-backed conversational search experience that will transform Post reporting into an interactive dialogue. Readers can ask questions, explore developing stories through personalized follow-up prompts and instantly access sourced answers and related coverage from across The Post’s newsroom.

¶The app will also include Post Express, an AI-powered news briefing that delivers personalized digests throughout the day based on each reader’s interests. Additionally, the app uses a personalized discovery engine that continuously learns from reader interests and behavior to surface the stories, topics and conversations most relevant to them.

¶This seems like an obvious extension of any news app at this point. I wonder if other outlets are developing similar features.

¶It makes a lot of sense. Surfacing related and earlier stories alone would be a welcome feature, for me at least. And “saving” articles on each platform is a hassle (Instapaper still solves this problem for me, though). AI should be able to support solutions to both of those challenges.

¶Someone has to pay for the compute involved, though. The Post is a “one-third subscription, two-thirds advertising” business. You can essentially read the paper online for free. So, doing the math, expect the new, AI-powered Hamilton to learn from your interactions and tailor ads accordingly.

¶A new study suggests the fish, already known to be among North America’s longest-lived freshwater species, may routinely survive for more than 200 years, some potentially reaching 300 or even 400 years.

¶Researchers estimated that a 160-centimeter male lake sturgeon could live between 90 and 279 years, depending on the population. For 180-centimeter females, estimated ages ranged from 99 to 427 years. 

¶This is crazy to think about. A hypothetical 400 year-old lake sturgeon, which could be swimming in the Great Lakes today, would have been born during the same year that Peter Minuit, director of the Dutch West India Company, coordinated the purchase of the island of Manhattan from Native Americans.