An "AI girlfriend offer" on a university website: the spam that slips into news feeds

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

The item received contains no news story. There is only a promotional title ("AI Girlfriend Chatbot Limited Time Offer AI Companion Deal For iPhone") and a URL on the uco.es domain. There is no data, no figures, no identifiable product and no statement from the university.

The URL points to a virtual tour page for the UCO's SCAI service. It carries an `xml=` parameter with base64-encoded content. Decoded, it shows what appears to be a reference in the format used by krpano, a 360° panorama viewer, loading an XML file hosted on a GitHub Pages subdomain unrelated to the university. We have not downloaded or verified that file, and the university has said nothing about it. But it follows the usual SEO spam pattern: the reputation of an institutional .es domain is exploited to promote offers, and sometimes to run third-party code.

Our take: what matters here is not the virtual companion. It is that aggregators and the AI systems that produce summaries take in links without knowing whether what lies behind them is journalism, advertising or an attack. In general, the AI companion market is real and deserves serious analysis, including its risks of emotional dependence and of profiting from loneliness. But that analysis requires verifiable sources, not a "limited time" offer slipped onto a university domain.

The practical advice for readers: don't open that link. Anyone curating automated feeds needs to filter by content, not just by domain reputation. This piece is deliberately short, because there isn't enough material to say more without making things up.