Done at the frontier, as it moved
A decade of undergraduate AI research mentored by Jon Chun and Katherine Elkins in the human-centered AI curriculum they co-founded at Kenyon College in 2016: humanities and social-science students doing the kind of original lab research that STEM students have always had.
Across 190+ undergraduate research projects, one pattern repeats: a new capability ships, and the students Jon and Katherine Elkins mentor are auditing it, fine-tuning it, or building with it the same semester, often one to three years before the research community arrives at the same questions. The projects are published on Digital Kenyon, where they have been downloaded 130,000+ times from 4,700+ institutions across 198 countries.
In June 2026, The New Yorker's "Eight Predictions for the Future of Higher Education" named frontier-lab, project-based research a model higher education will adopt by 2035.
Jon Chun and Katherine Elkins have run that model since 2016.Anchored to what existed
- 2018Neural networks in a humanities classroom, before GPT-2 existed: the first AI for Humanity cohort trained recurrent networks for music generation, convolutional style transfer, and deep reinforcement learning, and ran NLP across thirty years of college newspapers.
- 2019Fine-tuning GPT-2 within months of its staged release. Students fine-tuned the 345M model for creative writing and "centaur screenwriting" the same year it shipped.
- 2020Student papers on GPT-2 poetry were cited and archived by Gwern Branwen; by fall, students were already studying the freshly released GPT-3 API.
- 2021Systematic fine-tuning experiments, hyperparameter ablations on GPT-2 generation, the kind of study then rare outside ML labs.
- 2022Red-teaming ChatGPT within weeks of launch. A systematic study of safety, context, and obedience, among the earliest jailbreak research anywhere.
- 2023Auditing GPT-4 the spring it shipped. AI-detection evasion, literary self-assessment anticipating "LLM-as-judge," and cross-model benchmarking.
- 2024Studying real human-AI interaction at scale. Topic-modeling thousands of real ChatGPT conversations; retrieval-augmented systems; disability-language audits.
- 2025Multi-agent systems, contamination-resistant benchmarks, and domain fine-tunes (e.g. BioLinkBERT for pediatric rheumatology).
- 2026AI agent networks: network analysis of AI agent social networks, and aspect-based sentiment analysis of AI influencers.
Representative projects
A representative selection across three Kenyon courses: Programming Humanity, AI for Humanity, and the Senior Seminar. Full papers from 190+ undergraduate projects are on Digital Kenyon.
Generative AI & creative writing
- Can GPT-2 Replace a Sex and the City Writers' Room? Alasia Destine-DeFreece et al., 2019 (first)
- Centaur Screenwriting with 345M GPT-2. Olivia Kane, 2019 (first)
- 345M-GPT-2 After James Wright: Can AI Generate Convincing Contemporary Poetry? Jonah Zitelli, 2020 (cited on gwern.net)
- The GPT-3 Re-Imagining of "Howl." Emmy Roday, 2020 (first)
- Digitizing Camp: Training GPT-2 on The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Sarah Groustra, 2021
Model auditing, red-teaming & evaluation
- Breaking ChatGPT with Dangerous Questions: Safety, Context, and Obedience. Adam Blum, 2022 (weeks after launch)
- Can GPT-4 Fool TurnItIn? Testing the Limits of AI Detection. Abigail Foster, 2023 (first)
- Evaluating GPT-4's Consistency in Assessing — and Self-Assessing — Literary Texts. Annalia Fiore, 2023 (anticipates "LLM-as-judge")
- AI Proof Benchmarking: Mathematical Reasoning via Taylor Series Analysis. Godwin Idowu, 2025
Sentiment analysis & the shapes of stories
- Doubles and Reflections: Sentiment Analysis and Nabokov's Pale Fire. Catherine Perloff, 2019
- Many Stories, One Shape: Narrative Convergence in AI-Generated Fiction. Marisol Hernandez Brito, 2025
- Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with LLMs: Earnings Calls. Peyton Hodges, 2025
Multi-agent systems & the frontier
- Emotion, persuasion, and deception across multi-agent negotiations (valence-arousal-dominance modeling). Godwin Idowu, 2025
- Multi-agent debate to automate MLB front-office decisions. Parker Gibbons, 2025
- Network analysis of an AI agent social network. Muhammad Ibraheem Nadeem, 2026
Who does this work
Browse all the work on Digital Kenyon → · See Katherine Elkins's project archive →