Sundance added optional GenAI questions to a shared grant form

The shot

On 13 June 2025, the Sundance Institute's Artist Accelerator Program, working with the International Documentary Association (IDA), the Archival Producers Alliance (APA) and Google's Artists + Machine Intelligence (AMI) team, published an update describing version 3.1 of the Nonfiction Core Application, a shared application template used across multiple documentary funders, labs and fellowships. The update post states that five new, optional questions about generative AI (GenAI) use were added, following a March 2025 launch of version 3.0 and a community survey of 146 respondents that the Institute says informed the new questions.

What the documents show

The Institute's own posts establish two facts: the Core Application is a shared tool used by Sundance's Artist Accelerator Program alongside outside partners, not a Sundance-only instrument; and the GenAI questions are optional rather than mandatory, appearing 'only in sections where artistic approach, ethical responsibility, and production practices intersect,' in the Institute's phrasing. The earlier March 2025 post introducing version 3.0 states that an 'AI addendum' was still being developed at that time, which the June update fulfils. Neither post claims the questions function as a pass or fail eligibility screen, and neither describes a review committee's actual response to any specific answer.

The workflow

An applicant to a program using this Core Application version can expect prompts asking whether generative AI shaped 'any part of your artistic vision,' what ethical or accountability practices apply to that use, and how the applicant plans to disclose AI use to an audience, if at all. The Institute frames these as prompts for reflection and field-wide dialogue, and pairs them with outside resources, including a GenAI practices guide from the Archival Producers Alliance. Because the questions are optional, an applicant can decline to answer them without the posts describing any stated penalty, though the posts note that funders increasingly want this information for their own review purposes.

What the tool does not change

The application update does not establish a Sundance rule on which AI tools are acceptable, does not set a disclosure deadline once a project is in production, and does not describe consequences for an applicant who used GenAI but answered the optional questions incompletely. Reading five new prompts as a finished ethics policy would overstate what these two dated posts document; the Institute describes the application itself as 'a living document that should evolve with the field,' language that applies to the new questions as much as to the rest of the form.

• Which version of the Nonfiction Core Application does the program you are applying to actually use?
• If GenAI shaped part of your project, what would disclosing it to funders and to an eventual audience look like in practice?
• What ethical review or bias check can you point to if a funder asks about AI's role in a work sample?

The clearest fact in both posts is who wrote them together: a documentary-field coalition, with Sundance as one contributor among several, which matters when this update is cited as evidence of a single institution's AI guidelines rather than a shared field tool it helped build.