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

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.