Medium released a new writing app called TK on Monday, placing an artificial intelligence assistant inside the editor itself rather than in a separate chat window or browser tab. The publishing platform says the tool is meant to make it easier to move from an idea to finished prose.
The assistant is invoked by typing “@TK” in the document, followed by a request or prompt. Users can ask it to answer a question they would otherwise leave the draft to look up — Medium offers the example of how many days a particular month contains — or to pull in fragments of writing they previously saved in the app while working out an idea.
The name borrows from newsroom shorthand. In publishing and journalism, “TK” marks a spot where missing information will be inserted later. It abbreviates “to come,” but is spelled with a K rather than a C because the letter combination “tk” appears in very few English words, which makes the placeholder easy to spot in a draft and easy for a proofreader to catch. In Medium’s app the marker takes on a different job: helping writers fill in the blanks rather than flagging them.
Medium says TK ships with specific skills beyond question answering, including editorial feedback, headline feedback, and functions that check a draft against the style guide used by Medium publications.
Putting AI at the earliest stage of writing is a sensitive move. The publishing and literary worlds have spent recent years arguing over what role artificial intelligence should play in long-form prose. Several authors have lost book deals amid suspicions that they used AI to help write their work, and literary awards have faced scrutiny after winners were suspected of using AI assistance.
Writers have relied on automated tools for proofreading and light grammatical correction for years. The newer concern is that an assistant’s editorial “suggestions” can end up replacing the writing itself rather than reflecting the thoughts the writer set out to express. Because AI models are trained on human writing, there are also unresolved questions about whether detection tools can reliably distinguish text produced with AI from text produced with its assistance, or from text produced without it at all.
Medium takes the position that these distinctions will eventually stop mattering. The company frames AI as a boost to writing rather than a threat to it, stating that “artificial intelligence makes writing more important, not less” and that “AI is a technology that has the power to amplify human intelligence and it uses the written word as a foundation.”
At the same time, Medium acknowledges that AI raises the prospect of low-quality content and a blurring line between human-written and AI-written work. Its response is a transparency feature: TK lets authors publish notes that explain how AI was used in a given piece. In a blog post about the launch, the company described the notes as “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 is designed to keep track of what a user has written before and to suggest writing prompts. Users can optionally connect the app to their own AI agent through TK’s MCP server or its Claude skill, giving the assistant access to projects, positions and other material stored in that agent’s memory.
The app also adds a social layer for human feedback, letting writers share early drafts with other people and collect responses on them.
TK is available on the web at launch, with a desktop application on the roadmap. It can import and export Markdown files but is not itself a Markdown app. Writing stored in TK is not encrypted, since the product is built for collaboration, though users can set access control permissions on their work. Medium, which is profitable, says TK will be free to anyone with a Medium account.