A PERSONA-GROUNDED MOBILE SYSTEM TO SUPPORT ADOLESCENT DECISION-MAKING THROUGH SIMULATED HISTORICAL CONVERSATION USING LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS

Abstract

Adolescents increasingly bring important life decisions to general-purpose AI chatbots that offer generic advice with no historical grounding, no diversity of perspective, and inconsistent safety behavior for a minor-facing context. This project presents SageCircle, a Flutter mobile application that conditions a large language model on hand-curated biographies of 77 historical figures so that users can discuss real dilemmas with historically anchored “sages,” compare perspectives across a four-figure “Council of Sages,” and journal reflections entirely on-device [3]. Every user message passes through a fail-open moderation gate before reaching the model. Two experiments evaluated the resulting blind spots: a 160- message moderation test found strong detection of direct self-harm language but a recall gap on indirect, teen-voiced phrasing, and a 360-response persona test found that two of six sages exceeded their instructed reply to length on emotionally complex prompts [4]. Compared against persona-conditioned dialogue, scripted therapy chatbots, and memory-based generative agents, SageCircle trades infrastructure weight for biographical grounding and multi-perspective, mobile-friendly reasoning