Medium has launched TK, a web app with an AI assistant built into its writing editor. Writers summon it by typing @TK followed by a request. It can answer quick questions, pull in saved fragments, give editorial and headline feedback, and check drafts against a style guide. TK is free for anyone with a Medium account.
What is Medium's TK app?
Online publishing platform Medium has launched TK, a new app that puts an AI assistant inside the writing editor. Writers summon it by typing “@TK” followed by a request or prompt.
The name is borrowed from newsroom shorthand. In publishing and journalism, “TK” is a placeholder that marks where information is still missing and needs to be added later. It stands for “to come,” but uses a K instead of a C because few English words contain the letter pair. That makes it easy for proofreaders to spot in a draft.
In Medium’s app, the placeholder takes on a different job: helping writers fill in the blanks. Medium says the assistant can answer questions that would otherwise send a writer to another browser tab, such as how many days are in a particular month. It can also pull in fragments writers saved earlier, while they were still working out their ideas.
TK will also ship with specific skills for editorial feedback and headline feedback. Another skill can check a draft against the style guide for Medium publications.
The launch comes at a sensitive moment for publishing and literary circles, which have been wrestling with the role AI plays in creating long-form prose. Several authors have lost book deals after suspicions that they used AI to help write their books. Some literary awards have also faced scrutiny after winners were suspected of writing with AI assistance.
Writers have relied on automated tools for proofreading and light grammatical edits for years. The worry across the industry now is that an assistant’s “suggestions” can end up becoming the writing itself, rather than reflecting the writer’s own thinking. Detection tools face their own problems. Because AI models were trained on human writing, it is hard for those tools to reliably tell whether a text was written with AI, with AI’s assistance, or with no AI at all.
TK takes a clear side in that debate. Medium argues that these distinctions will matter less over time. The company says that “artificial intelligence makes writing more important, not less,” and describes AI as “a technology that has the power to amplify human intelligence and it uses the written word as a foundation.”
How does TK address AI-written content?
Medium acknowledges that AI raises the possibility of low-quality content and blurs the line between human-written and AI-written work. To address that, TK lets authors publish notes that explain how AI was used in their writing. In a blog post about the launch, Medium wrote: “This is a start of what we believe is required to publish in the AI era, which is to make the provenance of writing clear, transparent, and inspectable, right down to the prompting and source material.”
Beyond drafting help, TK can help users remember and organize what they have written and suggest writing prompts. It can also optionally connect to a user’s own AI agent through TK’s MCP server or Claude skill. That link lets the app better understand a writer’s projects, positions and other ideas stored in the agent’s memory.
The app includes a social layer for human feedback as well. Writers can share early drafts with others and ask for their comments.
At launch, TK runs on the web. Medium says a desktop app is on the roadmap. The app can import and export Markdown, but it is not a Markdown app itself. Text written in TK is not encrypted, because the app is designed for collaboration. Users can, however, set access control permissions on their work.
Is TK free to use?
TK will be free for anyone with a Medium account. Medium, which is profitable, is offering the tool at no extra cost to its existing users.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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