Research

AI safety, governance & narrative

Two threads, one practice: evaluating and governing frontier AI, and reading culture computationally. Both treat the humanities as a source of method, not decoration.

AI safety & governance

As principal investigator for the Modern Language Association at NIST CAISI (the Center for AI Standards and Innovation), Jon works on LLM evaluation, red-teaming, and ethical auditing. With collaborators at Oxford and elsewhere he co-authored a comparative study of global AI regulation across the EU, China, and the US (arXiv:2410.21279), and was among the authors of the open-source generative-AI position paper accepted as an ICML 2024 oral presentation (top 2%).

Computational narrative & digital humanities

Jon and Katherine Elkins were among the first to empirically evaluate GPT-3 for creative writing, and have written on what AI means for Narrative studies and on a human-centered AI curriculum. The work pairs real model evaluation with literary and ethical questions.

Selected publications

  • Elkins, K.; Chun, J. (2020). “Can GPT-3 Pass a Writer's Turing Test?” Journal of Cultural Analytics. doi:10.22148/001c.17212
  • Chun, J.; Elkins, K. (2022). “What the Rise of AI Means for Narrative Studies.” Narrative 30(1). doi:10.1353/nar.2022.0005
  • Chun, J.; Elkins, K. (2023). “The Crisis of Artificial Intelligence: A New Digital Humanities Curriculum for Human-Centred AI.” IJHAC 17(2). doi:10.3366/ijhac.2023.0310
  • Chun, J.; Elkins, K. (2023). “eXplainable AI with GPT-4 for Story Analysis and Generation.” Int. J. Digital Humanities 5(2). doi:10.1007/s42803-023-00069-8
  • Eiras, F.; et al. incl. Chun, J., Elkins, K. (2024). “Position: Near to Mid-term Risks and Opportunities of Open-Source Generative AI.” ICML (oral).
  • Chun, J.; Schroeder de Witt, C.; Elkins, K. (2024). “Comparative Global AI Regulation: EU, China, and the US.” arXiv:2410.21279

Reception

This work has been cited in venues including Minds and Machines, Science Advances, PNAS, Poetics Today, Prospects, and Policy and Society. See Google Scholar →