Jan 2024 saw Macmillan staff in Lower Manhattan greeted by a new team member named NOA. The publisher’s cafeteria was decorated with purple balloons and a marquee sign. A plate of doughnuts spelled out “NOA IS HERE.”
The welcome party
NOA stood for No Ordinary Assistant. Several employees told WIRED the name was offensive. An email introduced the tool as an AI chatbot built by German firm Chaptr. Chaptr is backed by Holtzbrinck, the parent company of Macmillan.
The email promised a safe environment where proprietary information would not be shared with third parties. This suggests a closed-loop enterprise tool that does not retain or share data for model training.
Staff were warned during training that NOA could hallucinate and always required human fact-checking. Employees were still encouraged to use the tool for emails, copy drafting, marketing research, and idea generation. Multiple staffers said they were told to paste only a percentage of authors’ manuscripts into NOA. Users could adjust the speaking tone to options like “lighthearted,” “spartan,” “pessimistic,” “sarcastic,” or “regretful.”
One employee recalled a Chaptr representative reassuring workers that the software understood the importance of content. “And here I thought we were publishing literature,” the employee said.
Later in 2024, staff were encouraged to use NOA for generating performance review goals. One email read: “We built a specialized prompt to have NOA write goals for you!”
Several employees described NOA as unhelpful and unreliable. “It was terrible, and no one used it,” one said. WIRED spoke with multiple publishing employees, including some who have since left. Names were withheld because of concerns about professional repercussions.
The shutdown
In October 2025, a company-wide email announced Chaptr would be sunsetting NOA. Since then, leadership has attempted to integrate Google Gemini into the publishing process. Some staffers experimented with using Gemini to evaluate submission letters from literary agents. One editor called the Gemini-generated evaluations “useless.”
Kelly Collins, vice president of communications and community at Macmillan, said the house uses Gemini for business purposes. She added there has been no directive from leadership to use Gemini for any part of the publishing process, including evaluating agent submission letters. Collins noted the points shared did not accurately reflect how NOA was rolled out and communicated but offered no further detail when asked which aspects were inaccurate.
She stated the company takes a thoughtful approach to AI, focused on employee awareness and education while always keeping people front and center.
Industry context
Macmillan is usually cited as the smallest of the Big Five US book publishers based on books sold annually. Its imprint Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishes literary fiction heavyweights like Sally Rooney, Yiyun Li, and Ben Lerner. Tor Books is a home for science fiction and fantasy authors John Scalzi, Martha Wells, and Nnedi Okorafor.
Since first reporting on AI in publishing, staff at all of the Big Five have claimed executives push them to use AI tools. Hachette, Macmillan, and Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe are suing some leading AI companies for copyright infringement.
Multiple bestselling Big Five authors say they have gone to war with their publishers over AI and are considering abandoning traditional publishing.
At Penguin Random House, the largest of the Big Five after the 2013 merger, several workers say they were encouraged to use ChatGPT Enterprise in learning sessions. PRH’s German division is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement.
In February, representatives from Hay House, a new-age self-help publisher acquired by Penguin Random House in 2023, presented a slide deck to some PRH employees. The deck explained how ChatGPT Enterprise had become a core productivity, creativity, and collaboration tool since adoption a year prior. One of four return-on-investment pillars was “Creativity,” including “idea generation, content development, and storytelling innovations.”
Despite encouragement from the C-suite, all PRH workers WIRED spoke with say they avoid ChatGPT whenever possible. “It makes it harder for us to do our jobs,” one employee said. Other staff said managers explicitly asked them not to use AI for creative tasks like publicity copy and cover design, causing confusion.
Claire von Schilling, executive vice president and director of corporate communications and social responsibility for the publisher, said PRH approaches AI as any significant new technology. She stated they are exploring ways it may appropriately support work, guided by clear principles and safeguards. These include protecting the intellectual property of authors and the company and preserving the essential role of human creativity and judgment.
Von Schilling also said PRH’s publishing groups and imprints have discretion to determine whether and how AI tools may be appropriate for particular workflows, including areas such as marketing, publicity, and design.
Author pushback
Several bestselling Big Five authors say relationships with publishers have suffered over the past year due to AI use. Combined, the Big Five authors WIRED spoke with have sold more than 30 million copies.
One bestselling author said they received marketing copy that included AI-hallucinated quotes from their book. The publisher insisted they were not AI-generated. “I was gaslit on all of it,” the author said. During recent contract negotiations, another bestselling author said they could not get a single Big Five publisher to promise no AI would be used in any way on their books.
“It’s undermining the necessary sense of trust that has to exist between writers and publishers,” one author said.
“It’s also frustrating to watch publishers get these massive settlements from AI companies and then embrace AI to do their work,” another said. “It feels like they’re feeding at both sides of the trough.”
Authors say cost-cutting layoffs at the Big Five have contributed to deteriorating conditions for editors and forced some to embrace AI for survival. “We’re seeing editors not reading the material at all and using Claude to create marketing language that barely has any relation to the book,” one author said. Other authors and agents said they have been asked by editors to write their own plans for revisions because the editors do not have time to do it themselves.
All authors spoke to say they want publishers to communicate when and how they are using AI. “The bare minimum we’re asking for is disclosure,” one said. Another wished the Big Five would get together and come up with a set of principles around AI they intend to adhere to. Some bestselling authors say their publishers’ use of AI is forcing them to consider publishing future books on their own.
“What are authors even doing with traditional publishers anymore if they’re going to outsource everything to a machine?” one bestselling author asked. “Why can’t an author do that themselves?”
Author responses
Following WIRED’s previous reporting, several high-profile authors condemned the adoption of AI tools in publishing.
Mo Ryan wrote on Bluesky: “I have never looked down on other publishing models (zine girly from way back) & every day, self pub looking ever more possible for future work.” Her most recent book, Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, was published by HarperCollins.
John Scalzi, the sci-fi novelist who signed a 10-book deal with Macmillan’s Tor Publishing Group in 2024, wrote: “I would be EXTREMELY annoyed to discover my PR is ‘AI’-generated, and as someone bombarded with dozens of ‘AI’-generated emails daily, I assure you the stink of ‘AI’ is immediately noticable [sic] and immediately dismissible. Publishers are not doing their new books any favors in using it.”
Bestselling authors who have already accumulated huge readerships say they do not need the institutional support of a Big Five publisher to sell copies. Brandon Sanderson publishes some fantasy novels through Tor Books, an imprint of Macmillan, but raised more than $15 million from his readers on Kickstarter to publish four books on his own in 2022.
“Publishers have always seen authors as a bit of a nuisance, and now there’s a desire to make us obsolete,” one bestselling Big Five author said. “What’s fascinating to me is that in the process of trying to make authors obsolete by using AI, the publishers are rendering themselves obsolete.”
