NEW DELHI: India’s Supreme Court has threatened legal consequences after a judge was found to have adjudicated on a property dispute using fake judgements generated by artificial intelligence.
The top court, which was responding to an appeal by the defendants, will now examine the ruling given by the lower court in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.
The Supreme Court called the case a matter of “institutional concern” and said fake AI-generated judgements had “a direct bearing on integrity of adjudicatory process”.
The incident has made headlines, becoming the latest in a series of instances where AI has disrupted court proceedings in India and elsewhere in the world.
The problems in the case in Andhra Pradesh arose in August last year when a junior civil judge in the trial court in Vijaywada city passed an order in a case about a disputed property.
The court had previously assigned an official to survey the property and file a report, which the defendants in the case objected to. The judge dismissed their objection, citing four past legal judgements - all of which were later found to be AI-generated.
AI programmes have vastly simplified tasks in the workplace but generative AI systems are known for their ability to “hallucinate” and assert falsehoods as fact, even sometimes inventing sources for the inaccurate information. The defendants challenged the order in the state’s high court, pointing out that the cited orders were fake.
