​Manufacturing justice: On the top court, AI use observations

But for its serious implications, a judge relying on Artificial Intelligence (AI) hallucinations to arrive at a judicial determination would have been comical. Given the serious miscarriage of justice that such hallucinations can lead to, if used in the judicial processes, the Supreme Court of India has likened it to methyl isocyanate , the poisonous gas that led to the Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984 — “invisible, insidious, and catastrophic by the time anyone notices”. The Court made these observations while setting aside the orders of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) and the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) in an insolvency case after finding that the NCLT had relied on fictitious AI-generated legal citations, a lapse overlooked by the appellate tribunal. This is the latest in a series of interventions by the Court this year, cautioning against the use of AI-generated fictitious judicial precedents in court proceedings. Through its rulings and oral observations, the Court has consistently adopted a strict and cautionary approach to the deployment of AI in the justice delivery system. On February 27, the same Bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe took cognisance of a trial court relying on AI-generated fictitious case laws and underlined that it was not merely “an error in decision-making” but amounted to judicial “misconduct”.