In an excerpt from his new collections published by Rupa Publications and republished by India Today, Tushar Mehta, Solicitor General of India, examines how artificial intelligence is changing legal practice. The excerpt, titled "Artificially Intelligent, Legally Embarrassed," argues that AI tools have moved into legal research and warns about problems such as hallucinations and fake citations. The piece quotes Elon Musk: "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon," and Tim Cook: "We'd rather build Apple Intelligence than just artificial intelligence-one respects your privacy, the other might sell it," as emblematic concerns. The excerpt foregrounds practical risks of uncritical reliance on generative models in courts and law offices.
What happened
In an excerpt from his books published by Rupa Publications and republished by India Today, Tushar Mehta, Solicitor General of India, examines the arrival of artificial intelligence in the legal field. The excerpt is headlined "Artificially Intelligent, Legally Embarrassed - Hallucinations, Fake Citations, and the Perils of Robo-Research." Mehta writes that AI "has quietly become the preferred tool of legal research, replacing our own natural stupidity," and highlights the twin phenomena of adoption and error risk. The excerpt cites two public tech-industry lines of concern, quoting Elon Musk: "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon," and Tim Cook: "We'd rather build Apple Intelligence than just artificial intelligence-one respects your privacy, the other might sell it."
Editorial analysis - technical context
Generative models commonly produce plausible but incorrect outputs, often labeled by practitioners as "hallucinations." Industry-pattern observations note that those hallucinations can produce fabricated citations or citations that do not support the asserted legal proposition. For legal workflows, the absence of reliable source provenance increases the cost of verification and raises malpractice and due-diligence exposure for attorneys and firms.
Industry context
For practitioners: law firms and courts operate under high evidentiary and ethical standards that amplify the impact of erroneous AI outputs compared with many other domains. Industry observers note that professional reliance on unverified AI output can erode research quality and client trust unless supplemented with rigorous verification and audit trails.
What to watch
- •Incidents where AI-generated filings, briefs, or citations are challenged or corrected in court records.
- •Professional-body guidance from bar associations or regulators addressing AI-driven legal research and disclosure requirements.
- •Vendor features for provenance, source-linking, and citation-checking integrated into legal research products.
- •Adoption of internal firm policies that require human verification steps and versioned audit trails.
Quoted material and provenance
All passages attributed here come from the India Today excerpt of Mehta's essays; the two book titles noted are The Bench, the Bar and the Bizarre and The Lawful and the Awful, both listed in the India Today piece. Mehta's observations in the excerpt are presented as commentary in those essays; the excerpt itself does not describe any regulatory proposal or formal court guidance.
Scoring Rationale #
The piece is practitioner-relevant because it calls attention to concrete verification risks when using generative AI in legal workflows. It is not a regulatory or technical breakthrough, but it frames operational and professional concerns that legal technologists and law firms must address.
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