I'm not. If the NYT had allowed advertisers to handpick stories to appear alongside, I wouldn't consider this substantially different. What I'm interested in i

I'm not. If the NYT had allowed advertisers to handpick stories to appear alongside, I wouldn't consider this substantially different. What I'm interested in is the switch from choosing to appear alongside a category or keywords (content targeting) to appearing alongside a type of story, with its more specific impact. The impact of ML isn't better-than-human parsing, it's almost certainly worse-than-human. It's just a question of adding story-level targeting which wasn't previously available, along with access to user studies that go beyond demographics and engagement to self-reported emotions.