NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Tuesday expressed serious concern over a growing trend of lawyers filing petitions drafted with AI tools that contain non-existent judgements such as ‘Mercy vs Mankind’.

“We are alarmed to reflect that some lawyers have started using AI to draft petitions. It is absolutely uncalled for,” a bench comprising Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices B V Nagarathna and Joymalya Bagchi said.

The bench made the observations while hearing a 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 CJI referred to a similar instance and said that in Justice Dipankar Datta’s court, “not one but a series of such judgements were cited”.

Justice Nagarathna said that at times, the judgements referred to are correct, but fake quotes are attributed to those verdicts, making it very difficult to verify the contents.

“It creates an additional burden on the part of the judges,” Justice Nagarathna said.

Justice Bagchi, meanwhile, lamented the decline in the art of legal drafting and said many special leave petitions mostly comprise lengthy quotations from prior judgments, with little original articulation of legal grounds.