News Post
Student and Faculty Build Salesian Chatbot
How could you use artificial intelligence to improve the world? This fall, Hope Dickson ‘25 and Kati Hylden Krueger ‘99, director of the St. Jane de Chantal Salesian Center, explored that question as they worked together to build a Salesian chatbot.
“With new technology coming out, we wanted to find new ways to interface with people who have different interests in Salesian Spirituality,” said Mrs. Krueger.
Drawing on the wisdom of St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane de Chantal, the resulting chatbot is a closed-loop system based on letters and writings from both founders of the Visitation Order. It can provide quotes on a user-prompted topic like the Little Virtue of joyful optimism, write a Salesian-inspired prayer, and even offer Salesian advice for a problem.
“Mrs. Krueger knows I love both Salesian Spirituality and coding,” said Hope, who was excited to work on a project like this.
Hope used the opportunity to program the bot as a demonstration for the Cubs Who Code student club, of which she serves as president.
“You’re training the bot, telling it what to do and what not to do,” she said. “It’s all English language.”
She told the bot it was representing St. Francis and St. Jane, and instructed it to end all interactions with a positive, Catholic, Salesian farewell.
“I’m very happy with the way it works. It has taken a lot of ‘we think it works’ then, ‘oh, it actually doesn’t.’ We had too much trust in AI’s accuracy,” explained Hope. ”We made a switch to a closed-loop function to ensure sources were clearer. I learned a lot more about St. Francis and St. Jane than I previously did.”
Hope input sources including Treatise on the Love of God and Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis, and letters from both St. Francis and St. Jane. Hope had to carefully input many letters through copy and paste; she jokes that she might be able to offer quotes like the bot now, just from training it!
“I think the chatbot bridges the gap between religion and a younger generation,” said Hope. “You can talk to it like a human. It can give you spiritual advice and prayers for whatever you are dealing with. It can represent Salesian Spirituality in a more concrete way.”
“I’m super excited. I thought it would take a couple of generations to get it to this level of proficiency. ... I’m blown away by this Salesian chatbot’s tone - it sounds like someone who has been in our community and has been engaged with it,” said Mrs. Krueger. “It’s a reflection of how when you feed a chatbot really high-quality material, it can give you high-quality responses. If something is fed St. Francis and St. Jane, and it speaks like a modern day bot, it’s truly carrying the charism.”
Hope hopes her peers will use it outside of class as a resource for guidance and asking questions as they explore their Catholic faith and the Salesian tradition.
On the programmer side, “I’ve definitely learned a lot more about AI and the limitations of it. It’s not perfect,” she said. She found that creating this specific job for a chatbot was actually helpful as open AI could not do what she and Mrs. Krueger had wanted.
“I think it is a great example of how we can use technology positively,” said Mrs. Krueger, “and that’s inspiring.”
The Salesian chatbot is available here.
- Salesian