New Delhi, February 17 The Supreme Court on Tuesday expressed serious concern over the growing trend of lawyers filing petitions drafted using AI tools, which contain non-existent judgments such as "Mercy vs Mankind."
"We are alarmed to see that some lawyers have started using AI to draft petitions. This is completely unnecessary," said a bench comprising Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices B V Nagarathna and Joymalya Bagchi.
The bench made these observations while hearing a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by academician Roop Rekha Verma seeking guidelines on political speeches.
Justice Nagarathna said she recently came across a non-existent citation, "Mercy vs Mankind."
The Chief Justice referred to a similar instance and said that in Justice Dipankar Datta's court, "not one, but a series of such judgments were cited."
Justice Nagarathna said that sometimes, the judgments cited are correct, but fake quotes are attributed to those verdicts, making it very difficult to verify the contents.
"This places an additional burden on the judges," said Justice Nagarathna.
Justice Bagchi, meanwhile, lamented the decline in the art of legal drafting and said that many special leave petitions mostly comprise lengthy quotations from prior judgments, with little original articulation of legal grounds.