KAY RUBACEK
Human rights advocate. Filmmaker. Strategic advisor. And the person asking the hardest questions about AI.
Kay Rubacek has spent 25 years studying what happens when systems are designed to strip humans of their agency, judgment, and sense of self.
She first encountered this pattern studying communist regimes. Her family escaped communism three times, from Russia, China, and Czechoslovakia. In 2001, she was detained in a Chinese prison for her human rights advocacy. What she witnessed there—how propaganda and institutional systems work to hollow out human dignity—shaped everything that followed.
She went on to produce award-winning documentary films exposing the human cost of the Chinese Communist Party, including Finding Courage, which features exclusive undercover footage from inside China’s labor camps. Her book Who Are China’s Walking Dead? brings that research to a wider audience. She has appeared on Fox News, MSNBC, American Thought Leaders, and dozens of other media outlets as a researcher, filmmaker, and commentator on communist regimes and human rights.
Alongside that work, Kay built a career advising leaders. She began as a producer and project manager at an award-winning educational technology company in Australia, creating learning products for children as young as two, sold through major retailers across Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. That early experience gave her a foundational understanding of how technology shapes human cognition from childhood through adulthood—a lens she has never lost.
Over the following three decades, she advised executives across corporate, nonprofit, and media organizations on communications, marketing, and talent strategy. She ran HR functions for small and mid-size businesses, hired and fired hundreds of people, and helped leaders communicate more effectively with their teams and their customers. She understands organizational culture from the inside.
When generative AI began reshaping knowledge work, Kay recognized the pattern immediately. The same mechanisms she had studied in communist propaganda systems—dependency, cognitive narrowing, the slow erosion of independent judgment—were now operating through algorithms and AI tools, invisibly, at scale, and with the enthusiastic participation of the people being affected.
She began reporting on AI and robotics in 2021, before ChatGPT even existed, and continued writing about it for The Epoch Times in 2025. Her articles on AI’s cognitive effects, the loneliness epidemic, the intergenerational divide, the moral stakes of algorithmic culture have been shared thousands of times and generated hundreds of personal emails from readers across the political spectrum. She now speaks to organizations about what AI is doing to their people, and what to do about it.
Kay is CEO and co-founder of KALU Agency, a content production and communications agency. She is a mother, a voice artist, and someone who uses AI every day, and thinks carefully about what it’s doing to her while she does.
Kay Rubacek 