Medium Launches TK, a Writing App With a Built-In AI Assistant and Disclosure Notes

Writers call up the assistant by typing "@TK" followed by a request. The company says it can answer quick factual questions that would otherwise send a writer to another browser tab, pull in fragments the user saved earlier, and suggest writing prompts. TK will also ship with skills for editorial and headline feedback, and one that checks a draft against the style guide used by Medium publications, according to the company.

The launch puts Medium on one side of a running argument in publishing over how much AI help is acceptable in writing. Several authors have lost book deals over suspected AI use and some literary prizes have faced questions about whether winners wrote with AI, while detection tools struggle to tell AI-written text from AI-assisted or wholly human work. Medium's position is that the distinction matters less than being open about it. In a blog post about the launch, the company argued that "artificial intelligence makes writing more important, not less."

Its answer to concerns about low-quality, machine-generated content is disclosure. Authors can attach notes setting out how AI was involved in a piece. "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 wrote in the post, as quoted by TechCrunch.

TK can also connect to a user's own AI agent through an MCP server or a Claude skill, so that the agent's stored memory of a writer's projects and positions can inform the app. Medium says the app includes a social layer for sharing early drafts and collecting feedback from other people, and it can organise and resurface material a user has written before.

The app is available on the web at launch, with a desktop version on the roadmap. It imports and exports Markdown but is not a Markdown editor. Because it is built for collaboration, writing in TK is not encrypted, though users can set access permissions on their work.

The name comes from a newsroom convention: "TK", short for "to come", marks a gap in a draft where information will be added later, spelled with a K because the letter pair rarely appears in English and is easy for proofreaders to spot.

Medium, which says it is profitable, is offering TK free to anyone with a Medium account. Chief executive Tony Stubblebine has previously described the company's approach as using AI as an assistant that carries out a writer's instructions rather than one that writes for them.