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AI in Higher Education: Academic and Wellbeing Impacts

• Between Promise and Peril: Educators’ Perspectives on ChatGPT and Its Impact on Professional Identity

  Etieno Enang, Danai Christopoulou

  This study examines how academics interpret the role of ChatGPT in higher education, focusing on its integration into academic practice, perceived risks, and implications for professional identity. While existing research has often emphasised student use or general adoption of GenAI, less attention has been given to academics’ own accounts of how ChatGPT reshapes teaching, research, assessment and role meaning. Drawing on qualitative survey data from academic staff at the University of Liverpool Management School, and informed by self-identity theory and identity work, the study uses thematic analysis to examine three interrelated dimensions: functional integration, perceived risks and challenges, and academic identity and role transformation. The findings show that academics incorporate ChatGPT in bounded and conditional ways to support writing, synthesis, ideation, teaching preparation, assessment and feedback, while retaining responsibility for judgement, contextualisation and final outputs. At the same time, participants identified concerns relating to academic integrity, originality, dependency, epistemic reliability, institutional credibility and accountability. Beyond functional use and risk evaluation, ChatGPT prompted reflection on professional identity, including concerns about deskilling, role ambiguity and future relevance, alongside the reconfiguration of academics as facilitators, curators and evaluators of AI-supported knowledge. The study contributes an integrated account of ChatGPT as a socio-professional catalyst that simultaneously expands academic possibilities, introduces new risks and reshapes understanding of academic expertise, authorship and responsibility.

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• Between Efficiency and Erosion: The Impact of Generative AI on Academic Professional Identity and Student Flourishing in Higher Education

  Tadhg Blommerde, Kerry Gibbins, Henry Richards, Jonny Hall, Stephany Veuger

  The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI or AI) into higher education has precipitated an Efficiency-Erosion Paradox, characterised by a significant tension between immediate operational gains and the potential long-term erosion of academic flourishing. This study explores this tension through the dual perspectives of staff and students at a university in the UK. Adopting a Students as Partners approach, the research utilised semi-structured interviews with fifteen participants (eight staff, seven students) to investigate how GenAI influences professional identity, wellbeing, and academic norms. The findings reveal a complex landscape where the pursuit of efficiency is countered by three primary tensions: the Digital Surveillance Paradox, the rejection of automated assessment, and the emergence of a Mastery Gap. First, applying Self-Determination Theory, findings show that a Digital Surveillance Paradox thwarts student autonomy, as automated detection creates systemic technostress and erodes the trust required for flourishing. Second, there is a distinct boundary regarding automated assessment, with both staff and students rejecting machine-led marking as a fundamental threat to the human-to-human relatedness essential for pedagogical flourishing. Third, the current state of institutional limbo encourages a reliance on approximate knowledge, creating a Mastery Gap where students bypass deep cognitive engagement in favour of algorithmic shortcuts, leading to the perceived devaluation of academic credentials. This study concludes that universities must transition toward Relational Governance, a co-created model of technology integration that restores trust and protects the reciprocal trust and human validation essential to the academic relationship.

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• Techno-Wellbeing and Flourishing in Higher Education: Student Experiences of Using Generative AI

  Sue Beckingham, Joel Gray, Dr Vicky Mellon, Helen J Parkin

  In recent years, the rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into higher education has sparked widespread interest, optimism, and concern. Tools such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini are increasingly used by students to support academic tasks, manage workloads, and navigate personal challenges. While much of the discourse has focused on academic integrity and performance, relatively little is known about how these technologies shape students’ psychological wellbeing, sense of self, and capacity to flourish during their university experience. Drawing on flourishing theory, this study explores how GenAI adoption intersects with students’ personal, academic and emerging professional lives, including its perceived role as mentor, coach or companion. Flourishing provided a lens to examine broader dimensions of wellbeing such as purpose, engagement, relationships and optimism in the context of GenAI. Utilising the Listening Room methodology, friendship pairs from a UK university took part in timed, prompt-led conversations, sharing their lived experiences of using GenAI. Findings indicate that students predominantly use GenAI as an augmentative tool to translate briefs, break down tasks, provide exemplars and refine communication, which enhance perceived competence and increase engagement and confidence in academic work. At the same time, students expressed concerns about fairness, academic integrity, over-reliance, skill atrophy, misinformation and the idea of GenAI as an emotional “friend”, highlighting potential risks to self-respect, authentic relationships and trust in assessment. The study concludes that GenAI can both support and erode flourishing, stressing the need for human-centred institutional guidance that foregrounds wellbeing, alongside moral integrity and academic outcomes.

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