In a striking indicator of how media and AI are growing closer, The New York Times (NYT) and Amazon this week announced a multi-year license deal over AI.
This in-take of the NYT’s valuable editorial content will be merged into certain Amazon customer touch-points and leveraged by Amazon to help in instructing its own, bespoke AI models.
The deal includes a variety of content from The New York Times, from its main news reporting to NYT Cooking and The Athletic.
The partnership is designed to improve Amazon’s abilities in a.i., like real-time news summaries and short bits of Times coverage within Amazon products and services, including on Alexa-enabled devices. These integrations will also feature direct link-backs to the NYT’s site, sending readers to peruse their own content.
It’s a significant pivot for The New York Times, which had loudly and publicly protested what it saw as the devaluing of its journalism in the era of A.I. Although the financial terms of the agreement are not disclosed, NYT CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said in a staff memo that the deal is consistent with the company’s stance that good journalism is deserving of compensation and that it makes sure the company’s work is sufficiently valued.
For Amazon, this deal offers the keys to a massive repository of high-quality, authoritative news and information, which becomes more important as it seeks to evolve more advanced and dependable AI systems.
With heightened interest in well-sourced data for training artificial intelligence, the significance of partnerships with established news organizations like The Times is growing again.
The partnership comes at maturing moment for the media business, when many outlets are coming to terms with the consequences of generative AI.
Some publishers have struck licensing deals with tech giants, but The New York Times has the aforementioned ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft — a case against the two companies for using its content without authorization to train their huge language models.
This new relationship with Amazon suggests a more subtle maneuvering by the NYT in seeing where they can get rewarded and be included elsewhere, all while protecting their IP.
The arrangement between The New York Times and Amazon could influence how other content producers and AI programmers work together in ways that, someday, could dictate the way news and information are found and put to use in an AI-dominated world. It highlights the continuing importance of quality journalism in a changing technology landscape.