As staff at the Lower Manhattan headquarters of Macmillan Publishers headed into work one morning in January 2024, they filed past something strange on the walls—flyers welcoming a new member of the team named “NOA.” The cafeteria was festooned with purple balloons and banners, according to several workers present, and with NOA’s name in light-up marquee letters. A plate full of doughnuts spelled out “NOA IS HERE.”
\n\nNOA was an acronym for No Ordinary Assistant, which many of Macmillan’s human assistants found “offensive,” 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 “backed” by Holtzbrinck, Macmillan’s parent company.
\n\nThe email also assured employees NOA was “a safe environment where you can input proprietary information without the risk of sharing that data with any third party.” Ostensibly, this means NOA was a closed-loop enterprise tool that did not retain or share data for model training.
\n\nMacmillan 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…
Original source: https://www.wired.com/