Can AI improve your dating life? UMSI professor Nicole Ellison weighs in

As AI tools take on increasingly social roles, researchers are asking: What happens when AI begins shaping how we form relationships? 

A recent article in Wired explores a new trend of “AI agents” interacting on user’s behalf to identify compatible friends, colleagues and even romantic partners. University of Michigan School of Information professor Nicole Ellison, an expert in computer-mediated communication, emphasized the underlying demand driving interest in these tools. 

“Online dating and matchmaking are a form of labor. Many people talk about them in that way,” Ellison said. “The appeal of outsourcing that—just as we’re outsourcing so many other things—I can understand.”

Ellison has long studied how people use digital technologies, like dating apps, to build relationships. 

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Read “AI Agents Are Coming for Your Dating Life” on Wired. 

Nicole Ellison is the Karl E. Weick Collegiate Professor of Information and a professor of information at UMSI, as well as a professor of communication, media and digital studies in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Learn more about her by visiting her UMSI faculty profile.