The presidential move
According to The Korea Herald, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung used Google's Gemini artificial intelligence assistant to defend the intention to invite the heads of two newly established agencies to Cabinet meetings, a choice that would overturn a convention in force for decades. On Wednesday, the president published a post on X titled 'I asked Gemini,' in which he calls the aim of excluding from the meetings the heads of the new Public Prosecution Office and the Serious Crimes Investigation Agency a sophistry.
In the same post, Lee cited the Constitution and the Government Organization Act, under which the president directs and supervises the heads of all central administrative bodies, and the head of a state body may attend Cabinet and discuss matters within his or her remit. The head of the Serious Crimes Investigation Agency is Kim Ji-yong, while the top position at the Public Prosecution Office is vacant.
The reasons cited and the criticisms
The president argued that allowing Kim to sit in Cabinet is consistent with the constitutional principle of responsible government and that obstructing the plan would place investigative and prosecutorial bodies outside democratic control. Political opponents instead believe that the presence of the two heads at Cabinet meetings could give the public the impression that such authorities are subject to the president's control. The source links this position to conservative concerns that the division of the prosecution service into two bodies, promoted by the liberal camp, could allow influential politicians to evade checks on their power.
Some also noted that the title of the post, 'I asked Gemini,' suggests that parts of the content were generated by the assistant. Lawmaker Na Kyung-won of the main opposition People Power Party reacted on Facebook by calling the president's level of competence truly baffling: according to the lawmaker, Lee uses Gemini to obtain slanted answers through leading questions and then publishes them on X. Na added that she had in turn asked Gemini to argue against the presence of investigative authorities at Cabinet, receiving a response about the risk of weakening the quasi-judicial nature and political neutrality of such functions.
The new political front
Han Dong-hoon, an independent lawmaker and former leader of the People Power Party, also weighed in on social media: according to the source, he wrote that not even bringing in Gemini's grandfather would allow a president to direct investigations or criminal proceedings, asking why no former president had kept investigative and prosecutorial authorities out of Cabinet and calling for an end to absurd justifications. The case remains limited to what the source reported: it does not indicate whether the Cabinet formally adopted the measure, nor what responses the questions posed by political figures to Gemini produced. The actual content of the interactions with the assistant and the institutional process of the presidential plan therefore remain to be verified.
