"Artificial Unconsciousness"

What toilet graffiti reveals about the limits of university mental health support in the age of AI

Abstract

This paper interrogates the tension between institutional deployments of AI chatbots for student wellbeing and the informal, peer-to-peer support networks that emerge in university bathroom spaces. Anchored in the student-inscribed phrase “ARTIFICIAL UNCONSCIOUSNESS CHATBOT,” the study undertakes a cross-disciplinary synthesis of two bodies of literature: systematic reviews evaluating the effectiveness and limitations of AI chatbots in mental health support, and empirical studies of bathroom graffiti as a mode of collective care. Drawing on Cohen’s (1997) theory of the safe house, Jung’s (1966) wounded healer archetype, and Heidegger’s (1962) phenomenology of authentic being-with, we analyse why graffiti walls succeed in fostering protected vulnerability, temporal spaciousness, and existential co-presence, while institutional AI systems often collapse these conditions into surveillance, efficiency, and artificial intimacy. The analysis culminates in the Human-AI Synergy Model, which reconceptualises AI not as a therapeutic substitute but as a relational relay: a tool that can preserve anonymity, scaffold temporal spaciousness, and reduce cognitive burden while pointing students toward authentic human connection. By contrasting what is systematically erased in institutional AI systems with what flourishes in informal peer safe houses, the paper offers critical guidance for designing AI in higher education that enhances rather than erodes the phenomenological conditions of genuine care.