[Invest&Law] Attorney Kang Mingu Appointed Chair of Legal and Institutional Committee at National AI Committee

President Yoon Suk-yeol is taking a commemorative photo after presenting a letter of appointment to Kang Min-gu, the chairman of the Legal and Institutional Subcommittee of the Presidential Commission on National Artificial Intelligence, and the representative lawyer of Law Firm Doul, at the launch ceremony and the first meeting of the commission on the 26th of last month.
[Image source=Yonhap News]

President Yoon Suk-yeol awarded a letter of appointment to Kang Min-gu, the representative lawyer of Law Firm Doul (age 66, Judicial Research and Training Institute class 14), who was appointed as the chairman of the Legal and Institutional Subcommittee at the inaugural meeting and first session of the Presidential Commission on National Artificial Intelligence held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul on the 26th of last month.

The National Artificial Intelligence Commission is chaired directly by the president and consists of 45 representatives from both the public and private sectors. Among them, 30 are private members, with lawyers Kang and Kim Sang-soon from Class Han-gyeol (age 52, class 36) appointed as legal professionals.

Lawyer Kang stated, "There have been cases where data without copyright has been used without permission during the training process of large-scale AI language models (LLM), and it is necessary to appropriately resolve these issues so that our AI companies are not hindered in conducting new AI research or developing services." He added, "For this, a legal and institutional reorganization concerning data copyright is necessary."

He continued, "There is an argument that the EU's AI Act, which came into effect on August 1 this year, is detailed and thorough and should be used as a basis. However, fundamentally, the EU created the AI Act to block American AI hegemony," adding, "The United States approaches AI industry promotion mainly through federal and state governments to maintain their hegemony, so it is not advisable to follow the seemingly good EU law 100% as is."

He emphasized, "The AI regulatory legislation that the National Assembly is rushing should be harmonized between the European and American models after reviewing the legislative trends of the US federal and state governments, but fundamentally, it should follow the American model."

Lawyer Kang expressed the view that it is unreasonable to expect the same results from Korea and the United States given the difference in investment scale.

He said, "If Korea is seen as a country possessing the three elements of large language models (LLM), data centers, and Korean language data, it is the world's third-largest AI power after the US and China." He added, "Europe or the Middle East merely tune the US SLM engine, but expecting results equivalent to Naver, which invested one trillion won, and the US AI big three (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot), which invested hundreds of trillions, is our greed." He then urged, "Please acknowledge reality as it is and become the Yongsan Presidential Office of AI First."

Finally, Lawyer Kang expressed his ambition, saying, "Since the legal and institutional fields are closely related to my major, I will do my best to at least restrain excessive regulation-oriented AI legislation or the establishment of new systems."

Reporter Ahn Hyun, Law Times