BENGALURU
Judges at the South Zone Regional Judicial Conference have raised strong concerns over the growing dependence on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in judicial processes, warning that hallucinated citations and fabricated judgments generated by AI tools pose a serious threat to the integrity of court proceedings. While acknowledging AI’s usefulness as a research aid, they stressed that it must never replace human reasoning, constitutional principles, or judicial discretion.
Speaking on the role of e-services in the judiciary, Justice M. Sundar, Chief Justice of the Manipur High Court, observed that the digital divide within the judicial system goes far beyond economic inequalities or computer literacy. He identified three distinct layers of this divide: digital natives versus digital immigrants, the digital rich versus the digital poor with unequal access to devices and connectivity, and those with digital skills versus those without.
A fourth, emerging divide, he noted, now revolves around AI—between those who view it as a valuable tool for judges and those who fear it could erode independent judicial thinking.
Justice Sundar cautioned that AI-generated outputs must be evaluated critically and not taken at face value. He referred to incidents during court hearings where AI tools produced fabricated case laws and inconsistent responses. “You may consider AI, but you cannot rely on it entirely to make a judgment. AI tunes itself according to the prompt. It lacks the emotions and holistic understanding required in legal analysis,” he said.
He cited a notable case in which a lawyer submitted a fake Supreme Court judgment generated by AI, complete with fabricated citations—an instance of “hallucination” that led to disciplinary action and the document being dismissed outright.
Emphasizing that AI lacks true cognition and merely detects patterns through data, Justice Sundar underscored the importance of strengthening the judiciary’s digital ecosystem. Expanding e-service centres in remote locations, he said, is essential for ensuring equitable access to justice.
“We are not looking at robot judges but cyborg judges—part human, part machine—where AI provides computational support while judges exercise independent reasoning. AI can assist, but it cannot replace judicial decision-making,” he concluded.
