About the Lab

The CUNY AI Lab (CAIL) is a faculty- and staff-led initiative for experimentation with large language models and other approaches to machine learning by CUNY researchers across disciplines. Based at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Lab supports work with AI that prioritizes ethical practice and aligns with CUNY’s public mission.

CAIL responds to the rapid adoption of AI in higher education by building infrastructure designed around real campus needs. The Lab’s work is organized around experimentation and aims to produce purpose-driven projects developed in response to concrete research and teaching questions. Our goal is to deconstruct the discourse around generative AI as a single, abstract technology, in favor of building a form of literacy that emphasizes user agency and treats AI as a set of techniques that can be prototyped, evaluated, and revised, allowing faculty, staff, and students to be in control of the tools they use.

CAIL 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. Building on these efforts, we are piloting CAIL in a select number of courses across CUNY while working toward broader access over time. As we scale, we are committed to developing infrastructure grounded in privacy, sustainability, transparency, and critical thinking—and to providing CUNY faculty, staff, and students with reliable access to AI tools that make data retention policies, model selection, and evaluation practices explicit.

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.