A legitimate university website used as bait to promote 'AI virtual girlfriends': spam, not news

By Universidad de Córdoba (UCO) · October 15, 2026.

There is no story to report. The material received is just an SEO-style headline («AI Girlfriend App Premium Vs Free AI Companion Yearly Plan 2026») and a URL. There is no text, no figures, no companies and no specific product from which to extract facts.

The URL, however, deserves attention. It points to a page of the UCO SCAI service's virtual tour, but its query string carries a base64-encoded block. When decoded, it appears to be a configuration tag for the krpano viewer (a 360° panorama tool) that loads an XML file from a GitHub Pages repository unrelated to the university. This is a known abuse technique: external content is injected into a reputable institutional website to rank spam or redirect to third-party pages. This is my own technical reading of the URL; I have not been able to verify what that remote file does.

Our take: what matters is not the supposed comparison of virtual companions, but how spam exploits trusted .es and .edu domains to slip into search engines and news aggregators. An outlet that covers the AI companion sector, a real market with an open debate over emotional dependence and privacy, must filter out these false signals. If the university has not fixed it, its web security team should be alerted.

That is why we are not publishing an analysis of the content: it would be filler. We recommend not opening the link and looking for information about these apps in primary sources, such as each company's terms and pricing.