About the Lab

The CUNY AI Lab (CAIL) is a faculty- and staff-led initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center that builds and maintains AI infrastructure for teaching, research, and academic work across CUNY. Its work involves hosting and maintaining the CAIL Sandbox, a zero-retention chat environment where faculty, staff, and students can engage with curated open-weight models, configure tools for research and classroom use, and consult a public Model Registry that explains model capabilities, licensing, and recommended use cases. CAIL’s aim is not simply to provide access to AI, but to make these systems legible enough for users to evaluate, adapt, and question the tools they use.

Alongside the Sandbox, CAIL runs a Tools Portal with standalone zero-retention applications for media processing and research workflows. Current offerings include tools for transcription, image description, and OCR, research support, and website development. Inside the Sandbox, the Lab also develops classroom chatbots, course-specific assistants built from syllabi and readings, and reusable project templates that instructors can adapt across sections and semesters.

CAIL also supports teaching and experimentation through documentation, training, events, and reusable technical infrastructure. The Lab publishes Sandbox documentation, guides and tutorials; hosts events; and shares its open-source projects on GitHub for reuse and adaptation.

Our work is guided by privacy, sustainability, transparency, and critical AI literacy. In practice, this means zero-retention policies that protect user data, attention to environmental cost, open-weight models that can be audited, and an approach to AI that emphasizes literacy and judgment rather than dependency.

The Lab draws on recent work such as the Google.org-sponsored Critical AI Literacy Institute (CALI), as well as initiatives like the CUNY Academic Commons and Manifold Scholarship, which reflect the Graduate Center’s longstanding commitment to creating accessible, scalable digital infrastructure for and with CUNY faculty, students, and staff.

CAIL is jointly administered by Graduate Center Digital Initiatives (GCDI), the Teaching and Learning Center (TLC), the Mina Rees Library, and the American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning (ASHP/CML). Learn more about our team.

CAIL is supported by the CUNY Office of Academic Affairs, AWS, Google.org, and the CUNY Graduate Center.