[AI Library] Preface
Artificial Intelligence on Trial
Preface
Attorney Kyungjin Kim
One day in 2025, I received an unfamiliar email at my office in Seoul. It came from a partner at an overseas law firm. "If an AI copyright dispute arises in Korea, what legal principles apply?" I started to write a reply, then stopped. I wasn't sure.
Thirteen years as a prosecutor, more than fifteen as an attorney, and I wasn't sure. That was the starting point of this book.
When I passed the bar exam in 1989, the world was different from what it is now. The law was clear, and technology was simple. Whether I was investigating corporate crime on my first assignment at the Incheon District Prosecutors' Office or handling intellectual property cases at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office, I trusted my compass: statutes and precedents. I could tell where I was going.
Then artificial intelligence arrived. The compass began to waver.
From 2016 to 2020, I served as a member of the National Assembly and stood on the front line of technology legislation. Digital governance, autonomous vehicles, data regulation. Every time a new technology surged forward, the law lagged one step behind. Sometimes two or three. Technology was running while the law was walking.
After returning to private practice, I began studying AI in earnest. I conducted a comparative analysis of AI policies and regulatory frameworks across sixteen countries.
I read the EU AI Act and reviewed U.S. AI initiatives. I wrote The AI Hegemony War and The AI Administrative Revolution. Along the way, I realized something. Policy and regulation alone are not enough.
You need to know what is actually happening in the courtroom.
Right now, more than seventy AI copyright lawsuits are underway in the United States.
In 2025 alone, the number of cases more than doubled. In September 2025, Anthropic paid 1.5 billion dollars to settle with authors. It was the largest copyright litigation settlement in U.S. history, the price for downloading 500,000 books from piracy websites to train its AI. On January 5, 2026, a federal court in New York ordered OpenAI to turn over twenty million ChatGPT conversation logs to The New York Times. Those records could serve as evidence of copyright infringement.
Copyright is not the only battleground. In May 2025, a federal court in California certified a class action age-discrimination lawsuit against Workday, the HR software company. The claim: millions of applicants over forty were discriminated against by an AI hiring algorithm. One plaintiff applied to more than a hundred companies without landing a single interview. He believed the algorithm had filtered him out. In August 2025, a Florida jury ordered Tesla to pay 240 million dollars in damages, ruling that defects in the Autopilot system contributed to a fatal crash. In December, the California DMV determined that Tesla's 'Full Self-Driving' marketing constituted false advertising. Deepfake fraud losses exceeded 200 million dollars in the first quarter of 2025 alone. We have entered an era in which anyone's voice can be cloned from just three seconds of audio.
This book is that record.
What happened the day The New York Times sued OpenAI. How an algorithm that screened 65,000 applicants ended up in court. How a voice actor whose voice was stolen fought back. These are the stories in this book.
I am a legal professional. I am also someone who believes in the future of technology. When those two things collide, what happens? I intend to show that in this book. Judgment belongs to the reader.
While writing this book, I used various AI tools including Gemini, Claude, and NotebookLM. I received AI assistance in searching materials, reviewing drafts, and verifying translations.
There is irony here. I wrote a book about legal disputes triggered by AI, and I wrote it with AI. There is a deeper irony still. Anthropic, the company that made the Claude I used, is right now paying its 1.5-billion-dollar settlement in installments. But this is the era we live in. We cannot reject AI. We must understand it. Only then can we coexist with it.
I hope this book serves as a small beginning of that understanding.
January 2026, Kim Kyung-jin
Kim Kyung-jin
Attorney · Former Member of the National Assembly · AI Policy Researcher
© 2026 Kim Kyung-jin. All rights reserved.