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It finally happened: The New York Times signed an AI licensing deal. Not with Perplexity, or Google — and definitely not with OpenAI or Microsoft — but with Amazon.

The agreement will allow Amazon products, like Alexa speakers, to use summaries and short excerpts from NYT stories and recipes, as well as to incorporate this content in the training of its proprietary AI models.

It’s a sign of the times: even The New York Times, long known for its staunch defense against illegal content scraping and its high-profile legal battle with OpenAI, has signaled that it’s open to an AI licensing deal — if the terms are right.

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In today’s tech lexicon, slapping “AI” in front of a problem, or a product, is the fastest way to make something old sound new, whether it’s clickbait, content farms, or a decade-old dashboard with a fresh coat of hype. The same can be said for AI slop — a term that seems to have gradually gained traction among media and marketing professionals over the last six months/year.

Nevertheless, while “slop” may have been an informal and unofficial way to refer to shoddy sites created purely for the purpose of arbitrage — a problem that’s plagued publishers and advertisers for decades — there’s no denying that generative AI is accelerating the scale of this to unprecedented levels. The upshot: media metrics are going to get skewed, big time.

And with the looming economic uncertainty brought on by the U.S. tariffs, that’s going to end badly for performance budgets if buyers aren’t proactive, some experts say. For publishers, it’s déjà vu — and their cut of the programmatic pie is only shrinking.

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