It’s a Wednesday night, and after a long day of classes, you finally get into bed and check your phone before going to sleep. You open your inbox and see an email with a subject line that immediately gets your attention: “Someone has a crush on you.” Let’s be real, you’re probably opening that faster than you’ve opened Canvas all semester. And that curiosity is exactly what Ditto, the college matchmaker app, is tapping into.
At this point, dating apps can start to feel a little repetitive: swipe, match, send a “hey,” and hope the conversation actually goes somewhere. Ditto takes a different approach by adding a little mystery to the process. But are college students down for it? It’s complicated.
Former UC Berkeley students Allen Wang and Eric Liu created Ditto as an AI-powered alternative to traditional dating apps. And since its launch in July 2026, over 203,949 students have joined the app. “For the past 20 years, we’ve connected in primitive ways,” Ditto says on its website. “But now … AI brings your ‘profiles’ to life as agents.”
On the website, you sign up using your college email. Then you answer questions about yourself, add your preferences, and what you’re looking for in a relationship. Finally, every Wednesday at 7 p.m., Ditto sends users a potential match through iMessage — not a separate app or website. If both people are interested, the service can help them move toward meeting in person.
There’s also one major detail that separates Ditto from the friend who swears they know the perfect person for you: Its matchmaker is AI. According to Ditto’s terms, the service uses generative AI to process users’ information and suggest potential matches. And whether college students want AI playing Cupid depends on who you ask.
For Alondra Silva, a senior at the University of Central Florida who has tried Ditto, the easy sign-up process initially made the service appealing. “I signed up for it just for fun because I’ve never heard of a dating site like that,” Silva tells Her Campus. “I liked how easy it was to sign up compared to other apps like Hinge or Tinder.”
UCF senior Anna* also found parts of Ditto’s registration process engaging. “I like the questions that it asks, which made me think deeply about my relationship goals in general.”
For Anna, not having to constantly search for a match is part of what makes Ditto appealing. “I like that it’s almost like passive dating,” they say. “I don’t have to swipe constantly to find a match; Ditto is doing that work for me, and I just see my match once a week.”
However, it’s not all great. Silva says she also liked “the concept/idea of it and how it sends you a potential match every Wednesday,” but her experience with the actual matchmaking was a little more complicated. “To be honest, it’s not really that good with matches,” she says.
She used Ditto for about three weeks and says the people she received didn’t seem to match the preferences she submitted. “I was wondering why every match was like the total opposite of my preferences,” Silva says.
It would’ve been cooler if it was like an actual person matching you with people, like that one movie Materialists.
Anna found that the app’s limited number of users made it harder to find someone she actually wanted to connect with. “I’ve gotten about three pairings so far, but no one that I was interested in meeting up with,” Anna says. “The dating pool on Ditto feels very small, especially at UCF.”
For Anna, part of the problem is that the final pairing doesn’t always seem to reflect how personal Ditto’s questions are. “I get so little information from my pairings that it’s hard to get their personality or any extra reason to be interested aside from superficial looks,” she says.
She also questions whether Ditto’s match explanations truly reflect the personal information users share with the app. “Ditto also gives reasons why the person and I would get along, and it seems so broad and vague, like that we both like deep conversations or that we’re foodies,” she says, “which seems odd because it asks very personal and deep questions.”
The experience also raises an interesting question: In the age of AI everything, would college students actually prefer a real person playing Cupid? It seems like the answer is “yes.” Anna says texting Ditto and giving it more details can sometimes take longer than expected. “It is also an AI, so it’s meant to keep the conversation going, but texting it and giving it more information can be a big time waster because it will make it seem like it is going to end the conversation soon, but then it will ask three more questions,” they say.
And, in Silva’s case, finding out the app relies on AI was a bit of a dealbreaker. “I had no idea it was AI-powered/run though, but once I found out I was like, ‘Oh, that def makes sense,’” Silva says.
Silva says she would have liked the service even more if humans had been involved in the matchmaking process. “It would’ve been cooler if it was like an actual person matching you with people, like that one movie Materialists, I think, and having student ambassadors,” Silva says, joking, “Put me in the office, hello.”
Maybe this is the future of college dating, or maybe it’s just another reason to keep your focus on your studies. Either way, if you get an email saying “Someone has a crush on you,” good luck not clicking it.