> Who trains these AI tutors and how do we prevent the system they're embedded in from churning out the same cookie cutter individuals, each with the exact same political beliefs and inability to comprehend the grey and nuanced?
I understand you're trying to dig into some idea of political homogenization and bias by pushing this point but I really think you're missing the forest for the trees.
I grew up in a low income area in the US and the standard of public education was abysmal. The teachers were overworked with huge class sizes and they spent so much time helping kids simply graduate that they had no time to help any student who was average or above. If you learned in a non-standard way, forget about it. Forget "cookie cutter individuals", half the time the teachers would show up and not actually teach (they'd put some music on and work on other things.) "perfect tutors"? In an era before digitized gradebooks, teachers could give you whatever scores they wished, no accountability. One big function of standardized testing is to push teachers to be accountable. Even the teachers that were trying their best just didn't have the time to do any more than the absolute basics.
I studied for SATs and AP exams by downloading textbooks from filesharing websites and studying those. Wikipedia filled in the gaps for non-STEM subjects. Nobody at my school could help me. At the time all the teachers and councilors knew is that I was going to be okay without any help from them, at least better than the other kids. I knew that nobody succeeded where I grew up and I needed to look outside to level myself up to succeed.
I can only see AI tutors as much better than the nothing that often is public education. The status quo is just overworked, ineffective teaching. Being able to bounce off questions from an AI tutor when it's late and you're up with homework and your parents either can't help or are hostile to your educational goals (the reality in a low income area) would go a long way. Of course the reality is that maybe AI tutors aren't actually coming and all we'll get are LLMs trained on the contents of school textbooks, but even that is a lot better than what we have now. The important problem will be making sure that everyone gets access to these AI tutors and not just the privileged in the elite schools who were going to be funneled into an elite college anyway.
Would it be best if we were able to shrink class sizes and have world-class teachers for children? Of course. Are countries going to be willing to pay the tax burden needed to make this happen? Probably not. In the meantime it's best for the poor kids to have the cookie-cutter, AI tutor while the wealthy have their own private tutors. It's not very different from the status quo today except the poor kids have nothing.