A Delhi court has imposed a fine of Rs 20,000 on an applicant for filing a complaint with grammatical errors and meaningless words, saying the application was an example of reliance on “technical intervention” or AI-driven drafting tools without human oversight.
Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate (ACJM) Neha Mittal was hearing a complaint by a woman seeking directions to the Delhi Police to register an FIR.
In an order dated March 30, while dismissing the complaint on the grounds of being “non-maintainable” and for being outside the court’s jurisdiction, the ACJM said, “Before parting with this order, this court deems it appropriate to highlight the quality of the drafting that has been dumped before it.”
She said that the application was full of “grammatical mistakes”, besides “insertion of some random meaningless words”, resulting in wastage of judicial time as efforts were made to make sense of such words, but to no avail.
To illustrate the absurdity, the court’s order quoted specific excerpts: “In para no. 3 of the complaint annexed with the application…few lines read as ‘that is why the me could not take legal action against the OCT accused because the me is Lady. a LATTES simple Framner… The mean Lebaut was in depression… The complaint EO SHO PS Mehrauli, New Delhi BHE BE Action was taken till me.”
Hinting that the petition was possibly drafted using artificial intelligence, the magistrate said, “These lines certainly do not make any sense and fail to convey anything else except the fact that drafting might have been done with more technical intervention and less of human mind contribution.”
The magistrate said that the country’s constitutional courts had deprecated the practice of filing such petitions.
“Despite nipping such complaints in the bud, litigants filing these frivolous complaints are definitely successful in wasting judicial time, if not more.
“In such situations, courts cannot be left powerless. Hence, in order to meet the ends of justice, this court deems it fit to impose cost upon the complainant,” she said.
The magistrate directed the complainant to deposit a cost of Rs 20,000 with the Delhi Legal Services Authority (DLSA).
