AI Identity, Empowerment, and Mindfulness in Mitigating Unethical AI Use

Emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technology has a pronounced impact on higher education, addressing existing challenges in educational settings such as larger school sizes and the scarcity of elite instructors. In all these areas, it has been noted th at AI has led to massive changes: some estimates suggest that at least 80 percent of workers will have the quantity and quality of at least some of their tasks influenced (for the better) by AI (Canagasuriam & Lukacik, 2024) . This means that, in educational contexts, psychological empowerment has been shown to mitigate the combined enullects of emotional exhaustion and depression, demonstrating that social relationships and leadership can bolster mental health in institutions (Schermuly & Meyer, 2016) . However, this is not to say that AI is without dangers; cybercriminals have also turned to AI to bolster their attacks, for example, in the form of spear phishing or malware installation, showcasing how AI can be abused as a tool to harm enterprises (Mirsky et al., 2023) . Psychological empowerment -- comprising meaning, competence, self - determination, and impact -- has strong enullects on person - environment interactions, which ultimately influence how individuals feel about and perform their jobs (Gregory et al., 2010) .