Medium’s new TK app brings AI assistance directly into the writing process

Online publishing platform Medium on Monday launched a new app, called TK, which aims to bring AI technology deeper into the writing process. The idea behind TK is to make it easier to turn ideas into written words by incorporating an AI assistant into the editor itself, allowing users to ask for help by typing “@TK” followed by their request or prompt.

In publishing and journalism, the term “TK” serves as a placeholder used to mark where missing information can be added later. The “TK” stands for “to come,” but uses a “K” instead of “C” as there are few English words where the “tk” letter combination exists, making it stand out more easily in written text where it could be caught by proofreaders.

In Medium’s app, TK takes on a new role as it tries to help users fill in the blanks.

The company suggests the AI assistant could help answer questions that you might normally have to switch to another tab to quickly look up, like how many days are in a particular month. The app could also pull in bits of writing you had previously saved to the app when you were still fleshing out your ideas.

In addition, Medium says TK will ship with particular skills for editorial feedback, headline feedback, and others that could match your draft to the style guide for Medium publications.

Medium’s move to embrace AI in the early stages of writing could prove controversial at a time when the publishing and literary worlds have been reckoning with the role that artificial intelligence has played in the creation of new long-form prose. Multiple authors have lost book deals over suspicions that they used AI technology to help them write, while other literary awards have come under scrutiny after winners were suspected of writing with AI assistance.

While writers have long used automated tools for proofreading and light grammatical edits, there is growing concern across the publishing industry that an AI assistant’s editorial “suggestions” can become the writing itself, instead of being reflective of the thoughts in the writer’s own mind.

But because AI models were trained on human writing, there are also questions around the reliability of AI detection tools in terms of their ability to properly determine when something was written with AI, rather than with its assistance, versus not at all.

TK leans into this debate, taking the side that these nuances will ultimately no longer matter in the end. Instead, the company celebrates what AI can bring to the world of writing, saying that “artificial intelligence makes writing more important, not less,” and proclaiming that “AI is a technology that has the power to amplify human intelligence and it uses the written word as a foundation.”

Still, Medium concedes that AI does raise the possibility of low-quality content and blurring the line between what’s human-written versus AI-written. To address these concerns, TK allows authors to publish notes that transparently explain how AI was used in their writing.

“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,” Medium explained in a blog post about the launch.

In addition to writing assistance, TK will help users remember and organize what they had previously written and suggest writing prompts. The app can also optionally connect to your own AI agent through TK’s MCP server or Claude skill, so the app can better understand your projects, your positions, and other ideas that could be stored in your agent’s memory.

Meanwhile, the new app incorporates human feedback in a social layer, the company says, allowing writers to share their early drafts with others and get feedback.

At launch, TK is available on the web, but a desktop app is on the roadmap, Medium says. The app can import and export Markdown, but it’s not a Markdown app itself. The writing in TK is also not encrypted, as the app is designed for collaboration, but users will be able to set access control permissions on their work.

Medium, which is profitable, says TK will be a free tool for those with a Medium account.