Chinese university students perceive generative AI as a low-risk help-seeking space during academic stress and loneliness

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is usually discussed in higher education as a productivity, feedback, or integrity problem. This theory-building qualitative study examines GenAI as a perceived low-risk help-seeking space in students’ academic coping. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 22 students at a public university in eastern China, we examine how academic stress and loneliness make human help difficult, what perceived affordances make GenAI easier to approach, and how students use it in relation to emotional support and learning regulation.

Reflexive thematic analysis generated four themes: academic pressure became lonely when difficulty threatened competence and identity; perceived low risk meant reduced interpersonal exposure and controllable disclosure, rather than high trust or objective safety; participants described two linked but non-identical support sequences, brief normalisation followed by an actionable step and task scaffolding followed by emotional relief; and students maintained boundaries around accuracy, dependence, ethics, and professional care. We propose a context-sensitive model in which GenAI may serve as a temporary academic help-seeking channel, with tool-based disclosure sometimes connecting emotion-focused coping and problem-focused regulation without replacing human or professional support. The analysis yields conditional propositions for AI-era educational support, while recognising that these propositions require examination in other settings.

Department of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, Xinzhou Normal University, Xinzhou, 034000, China School of Health Management, Weifang Nursing Vocational College, Qingzhou, 262500, China Industrial Development Service Center, Weifang Nursing Vocational College, Qingzhou, 262500, China Department of Midwifery, Weifang Nursing Vocational College, Qingzhou, 262500, China The authors declare no competing interests. This study received ethical approval from the Ethics Committee of the Department of Midwifery, Weifang Nursing Vocational College, which was the researchers’ employing institution; A University was the pseudonymous study site. Formal ethical approval was granted via the committee’s internal review procedure on 16 January 2026; no public-facing approval number was assigned for this internally funded educational research project.

No formal site-access record was required under A University’s open campus research policy. All methods were performed in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations, and the study was conducted in compliance with the Declaration of Helsinki. All participants provided written informed consent before the interview, including consent for audio recording and publication of anonymised illustrative quotations, in full accordance with the approved informed consent protocol.

Participants could skip questions, pause, or withdraw in accordance with the consent procedure. If distress arose, interviews were paused or ended and counselling or crisis-support contacts were offered. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it.