10.06.2026

On Using A.I. in Grant Applications

Mass Cultural Council Program Staff

Believing in the power of arts and culture means believing in the value of the human voice. Whether that voice is language, music, visual art, or any form of expression, it has a unique value, grounded in its authenticity.

As your state arts agency, we value the authenticity and power of the human voice. So is it any surprise we would rather our applicants use their own unique and personal voice when applying for grants?

We award grants to individuals, organizations, and communities in the Massachusetts cultural sector, and many of our applications pose narrative questions so we can learn about our applicants’ projects, budgets, impacts, and so on.

In the past couple of years, we have noticed a growing number of applications where the “voice” answering those narrative questions is increasingly vague. There’s an unspecific quality to the language, sometimes just rearranging and reiterating our own words, without adding meaningful detail.

In short, we are seeing more and more narrative responses that seem to be generated by large language models (LLMs), a specific subset of artificial intelligence (A.I.).

There’s no denying that LLMs (such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) can be useful tools for grant writing. They are helpful for brainstorming, checking grammar, or tightening up text to meet constraining character limits. But they can also churn out bland sentences that SEEM to answer the question without actually saying that much. Besides which, they’ve been known to “hallucinate” or provide inaccurate details.

Narrative responses that are primarily generated by A.I. are less likely to be successful in Mass Cultural Council grant processes. Applications that lack individuality or specificity receive lower scores from our reviewers.

“What if I’m not an experienced grant writer?” you might ask. Due to our ongoing equity work, we instruct our reviewers to base their scores on the review criteria and the content of responses, not applicants’ grant writing skills or grammatical perfection. We would rather review a flawed but authentic answer than a sleek but generic one generated by A.I.

All this to say: tools like ChatGPT can help organize and clarify your thoughts, but ultimately, it’s YOUR VOICE we want to hear.

As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his poem “Hyperion”, “O, how wonderful is the human voice! It is indeed the organ of the soul!”