Publishers<\/a> headed into work one morning in January 2024, they filed past something strange on the walls\u2014flyers welcoming a new member of the team named \u201cNOA.\u201d The cafeteria was festooned with purple balloons and banners, according to several workers present, and with NOA\u2019s name in light-up marquee letters. A plate full of doughnuts spelled out \u201cNOA IS HERE.\u201d<\/p>\nNOA was an acronym for No Ordinary Assistant, which many of Macmillan\u2019s human assistants found \u201coffensive,\u201d multiple employees tell WIRED. In an email to staff, NOA was introduced as an AI chatbot developed by the German software company Chaptr, which is \u201cbacked\u201d by Holtzbrinck, Macmillan\u2019s parent company.<\/p>\n
The email also assured employees NOA was \u201ca safe environment where you can input proprietary information without the risk of sharing that data with any third party.\u201d Ostensibly, this means NOA was a closed-loop enterprise tool that did not retain or share data for model training.<\/p>\n
Macmillan staffers say they were warned during training sessions that NOA could hallucinate and would always need to be fact-checked by humans. Still, employees say, they were encouraged to use NOA for composing emails, drafting copy, doing marketing research, and generating ideas. Multiple staffers say they were told to \u201conly\u201d paste a \u201cpercentage\u201d of authors\u2019 manuscripts into NOA. Employees could also adjust NOA\u2019s speaking tone, with options including \u201clighthearted,\u201d \u201cspartan,\u201d pessimistic,\u201d \u201csarcastic,\u201d and \u201cregretful.\u201d<\/p>\n
One Macmillan employee remembers a Chaptr representative reassuring workers during an early in-person training session that Chaptr understood publishers were dealing with something very important\u2014content. \u201cAnd here I thought we were publishing literature,\u201d the employee says.<\/p>\n
Later in 2024, Macmillan employees were encouraged to use NOA to generate their goals for performance reviews. \u201cWe built a specialized prompt to have NOA write goals for you!\u201d one email read.<\/p>\n
Several Macmillan employees say NOA was unhelpful and unreliable. \u201cIt was terrible, and no one used it,\u201d one says. WIRED spoke with multiple publishing employees for this article, including some who have since left their employers. WIRED is not naming these employees, nor the authors we interviewed, because they are concerned about professional repercussions.<\/p>\n
In October 2025, Macmillan staff learned via a company-wide email that Chaptr would be sunsetting NOA. Since then, workers say, leadership has been attempting to integrate Google Gemini into the publishing process. Some staffers subsequently experimented with using Gemini to evaluate submission letters from literary agents, but the Gemini-generated evaluations were \u201cuseless,\u201d according to one editor.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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