Balloons, Doughnuts, and a Dead Chatbot: Inside Big Five AI Turmoil

Macmillan Publishers threw a party — balloons, banners, doughnuts spelling out "NOA IS HERE" — for a workplace AI chatbot that employees say they never used, and that the company killed off less than two years later.

On a January 2024 morning at Macmillan's Lower Manhattan headquarters, staff walked past flyers welcoming a new "team member" named NOA. The cafeteria carried purple balloons, banners, and NOA's name in light-up marquee letters, according to several workers who were present.

NOA stood for "No Ordinary Assistant" — a name several of Macmillan's human assistants found "offensive," multiple employees told WIRED. The chatbot came from the German software company Chaptr, which Macmillan described in a staff email as "backed" by Holtzbrinck, Macmillan's parent company.

Why does a publisher's internal chatbot matter? Because it sits at the center of a wider fight: staff across all of the Big Five US publishers say executives are pushing AI tools on them even as three of those publishers sue major AI companies for copyright infringement, and bestselling authors openly discuss walking away from traditional publishing over it.

What was NOA supposed to do?

Macmillan's introductory email promised NOA was "a safe environment where you can input proprietary information without the risk of sharing that data with any third party" — in effect, a closed-loop enterprise tool that didn't retain or share data for model training.

Employees were warned in training sessions that NOA could hallucinate and would always need human fact-checking. They were still encouraged to use it for:

• composing emails
• drafting copy
• marketing research
• generating ideas

Multiple staffers say they were told to paste only a "percentage" of authors' manuscripts into the tool. NOA also offered adjustable speaking tones, including "lighthearted," "spartan," "pessimistic," "sarcastic," and "regretful."

One employee remembers a Chaptr representative at an early in-person training session reassuring workers that Chaptr understood publishers were dealing with something very important — content. "And here I thought we were publishing literature," the employee said.

Later in 2024, the pushes continued. One email told staff: "We built a specialized prompt to have NOA write goals for you!" — encouraging employees to generate their own performance-review goals with the bot.

The reception was blunt. "It was terrible, and no one used it," one Macmillan employee said. WIRED withheld the names of employees and authors it interviewed because they fear professional repercussions.

How did NOA end?

In October 2025, a company-wide email informed Macmillan staff that Chaptr would sunset NOA. Workers say leadership has since pushed to integrate Google Gemini into the publishing process. Some staffers experimented with using Gemini to evaluate submission letters from literary agents, but one editor called the Gemini-generated evaluations "useless."

Kelly Collins, Macmillan's vice president of communications and community, told WIRED the publisher uses Gemini for its "business" but that "there has not been any directive from Macmillan leadership to use Gemini for any part of the publishing process, including to evaluate submission letters from agents." She said "the points shared do not accurately reflect how NOA was rolled out and communicated" but did not elaborate when WIRED asked which aspects were inaccurate. Collins added that Macmillan "takes a thoughtful approach to AI, focused on employee awareness and education while always keeping people front and center."

The stakes are real for a house of this size. Macmillan is usually cited as the smallest of the Big Five US publishers by annual books sold, yet its imprints carry major names: Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishes Sally Rooney, Yiyun Li, and Ben Lerner, while Tor Books is home to John Scalzi, Martha Wells, and Nnedi Okorafor. In short: the smallest Big Five house still anchors significant literary franchises.

What's happening across the Big Five?

Staff at all five major US publishers report executives pushing AI tools, even as Hachette, Macmillan, and Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe (PRH's German-language division) sue leading AI companies for copyright infringement.

At Penguin Random House — the largest of the Big Five since the 2013 Penguin–Random House merger — several workers say they've been encouraged to use ChatGPT Enterprise in AI learning sessions, even though PRH's German division is suing OpenAI.

In February, representatives from Hay House, a new-age self-help publisher PRH acquired in 2023, presented a slide deck to some PRH employees. It described ChatGPT Enterprise as a "core productivity, creativity, and collaboration tool" adopted a year earlier, with "Creativity" listed as one of four return-on-investment pillars — covering "idea generation, content development, and storytelling innovations."

The workforce response is split. Every PRH employee WIRED spoke with says they avoid ChatGPT whenever possible. "It makes it harder for us to do our jobs," one said. Others report managers explicitly asking them not to use AI for creative tasks like publicity copy and cover design — leaving staff confused about what the company actually wants.

Claire von Schilling, PRH's executive vice president and director of corporate communications and social responsibility, said via email: "Penguin Random House approaches AI as we would any significant new technology." She said the publisher is "exploring ways it may appropriately support our work, guided by clear principles and safeguards, including protecting the intellectual property of our authors and the company and preserving the essential role of human creativity and judgment in publishing." She added that 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."

The takeaway: publishers are suing AI companies in court while adopting their products internally, and the mixed signals are reaching staff.

What do the authors say?

Several bestselling Big Five authors — who, combined, have sold more than 30 million copies — say their relationships with publishers have deteriorated over the past year over AI use.

One bestselling author received marketing copy containing AI-hallucinated quotes from their own book; the publisher insisted the quotes were not AI-generated. "I was gaslit on all of it," the author said. During recent contract negotiations, another bestselling author could not get a single Big Five publisher to promise that 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. Another put it more sharply: "It's also frustrating to watch publishers get these massive settlements [from] AI companies and then embrace AI to do their work. It feels like they're feeding at both sides of the trough."

Authors also link AI adoption to cost-cutting layoffs that have stretched editors thin. "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. Authors and agents say editors have asked writers to draft their own revision plans "because the editors don't have time to do it themselves."

Will authors stay?

The authors WIRED spoke with want one thing first: honesty. "The bare minimum we're asking for is disclosure," one said. Another wishes the Big Five "would get together and come up with a set of principles around AI that they intend to adhere to." Others are already planning exits. "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?"

The threat has public faces. "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," Mo Ryan — whose book Burn It Down was published by HarperCollins — wrote on Bluesky. John Scalzi, 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 by 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."

The economics make the threat credible. Brandon Sanderson, who publishes some fantasy novels through Macmillan's Tor Books, raised more than $15 million on Kickstarter in 2022 to publish four books on his own.

"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."

The plain takeaway: NOA's balloons came down, Gemini arrived without a party, and the authors are calculating whether they still need a publisher at all.