Jon A. Chun
The hardest questions about AI can't be answered inside one discipline, one institution, or one sector — so Jon Chun builds the collaborations that cross all of them. For a decade he has co-built Human-Centered AI: turning the oldest human questions into quantifiable, testable models with frontier AI, across academia, industry, and government.
He co-leads the team representing the 25,000-member Modern Language Association at NIST CAISI (LLM evaluation and red-teaming) and is co-PI on Schmidt Sciences HAVI, building open-source AI to rescue endangered cultural archives. He pioneered one of the first interdisciplinary Human-Centered AI curricula at Kenyon's AI CoLab, and earlier co-founded and led SafeWeb.
Harder to fool than we are
Instruction-tuned language models are 110–300× more resistant to narrative manipulation than people — measured across healthcare, law, and finance. The systems we worry about being fooled are, on this axis, far harder to fool than we are. Read the research →
From internet security to AI standards
- 2000Co-founded SafeWeb — internet privacy and anti-censorship; the first In-Q-Tel security investment.
- 2003SafeWeb acquired by Symantec for $26M; two US patents on early SSL/clientless VPN appliances.
- 2016Co-founded Kenyon's AI CoLab and human-centered AI curriculum with Katherine Elkins — six years before ChatGPT.
- 2020Among the first to empirically evaluate GPT-3 for creative writing.
- 2024ICML 2024 on open-source generative AI; began co-leading the MLA team at NIST CAISI.
- 2025Co-PI on Schmidt Sciences HAVI — Archival Intelligence, 1 of 23 teams worldwide.
Three arcs, one practice
SafeWeb and the early security industry; the nonprofit Human-Centered AI Lab; convening collaborations that cross sectors.
LLM evaluation and red-teaming, comparative global AI regulation, and computational narrative — published at ICML and across the humanities.
Co-founder of an early interdisciplinary humane-studies program operationalizing the liberal arts with ML/AI, continuous since 2016.
Connecting the people who build the future
The work runs across silos that rarely talk to each other — frontier AI labs, industry analysts and investors, government standards bodies, multilateral institutions, and nonprofits.
OpenAI higher-education forums; Meta Open Innovation AI Research Community; the Notre Dame–IBM Tech Ethics Lab.
Multi-year participation (since 2023) in live BWG forums across the AI-market agenda with analysts, integrators, investors, and operators.
Co-leads the MLA team at the NIST Center for AI Standards and Innovation; engagement with UNESCO and the UN on AI governance.
Interdisciplinary roundtables; co-founder of the nonprofit Human-Centered AI Lab.
Work done first
Dates establish priority; the Reception page documents the uptake that followed. Most of the research below is co-authored with Katherine Elkins.
- 1996Co-architected one of the first web-based electronic health record systems at a major US teaching hospital (University of Iowa).
- 2001The first security investment from In-Q-Tel (the CIA-affiliated venture fund), for SafeWeb.
- 2019One of the first methodologies for sentiment analysis of narrative — introducing "middle reading," between distant and close reading.
- 2020The first writer's Turing test of a large language model — "Can GPT-3 Pass a Writer's Turing Test?"
- 2023Pioneered one of the first Human-Centered AI curricula in the digital humanities, six years after launching the program at Kenyon.
- 2024The first ethics-based audit of moral reasoning in deployed LLMs, and the first systematic EU–China–US regulatory comparison after the EU AI Act.
Archival Intelligence
Co-PI on Archival Intelligence, building free, open AI tools to rescue New Orleans' endangered Creole and Cajun multilingual newspapers and early jazz artifacts from smartphone photography — and to confront "cultural flattening" in AI models.
1 of 23 teams selected worldwide for the inaugural Humanities and AI Virtual Institute ($11M program; award up to $330K) — a highly selective global competition, among the top few percent of applicants. The cohort's peers include Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne. Kenyon's AI CoLab is one of very few teams led from a small liberal-arts college, in a cohort otherwise dominated by major research universities.
Breadth, quantified
- 3 seatsFederal (NIST CAISI), foundation (Schmidt HAVI), and industry (Meta / BWG) — held at the same time
- Only oneHumanities-led team in the NIST CAISI consortium, representing the 25,000-member MLA
- ~2 billionSafeWeb transactions in 8 months — the largest online privacy service of its era
- 35×Trailing revenue at the $26M Symantec acquisition; first-ever In-Q-Tel security investment
- ICML 2024Oral presentation — top 2% of submissions
- 110–300×How much harder instruction-tuned LLMs resist narrative manipulation than people
- 61% / 90%Women / non-STEM students in the gateway course — broadening who does serious AI work
- 70+Countries where the research is cited (see Reception)
Cited, quoted, and built on
"Debating the system of values we wish these tools to align with is the first step."
Tanya Klowden & Terence Tao (Fields Medalist), engaging Chun & Elkins, IJHAC (2023)"The human-centered AI curriculum at Kenyon encompassed the true essence of a liberal arts education: using a wide range of academic disciplines to discuss world-changing contemporary issues."
Raul Romero, Kenyon College Class of 2022- Forbes
- NPR
- Christian Science Monitor
- Al Jazeera
- Chronicle of Higher Education
Common questions
What is Human-Centered AI as Jon Chun practices it?
It uses state-of-the-art AI and real engineering to turn the oldest human questions — what it means to be human, what a good life and a good society are — into quantifiable, testable models: building, measuring, and governing, not only critiquing. It is distinct from human-centered UI/UX design, from non-technical AI-ethics or STS critique, and from low-code digital humanities, and it works through radical collaboration across disciplines, industry, government, and non-profits. Jon pioneered one of the first such curricula with Katherine Elkins at Kenyon's AI CoLab in 2016.
What does Jon Chun do now?
He co-leads the team representing the Modern Language Association at NIST CAISI (LLM evaluation and red-teaming) and is co-PI on Schmidt Sciences HAVI (Archival Intelligence), one of 23 teams selected worldwide.
What was SafeWeb?
An internet privacy company Jon co-founded in 2000 and later led as CEO. It received the first security investment from In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit strategic investment firm affiliated with the CIA, and was acquired by Symantec in 2003 for $26 million.