Although 2023 brought us a lot of news from Google, Bard was the star of the year. To recall, its beginnings were a bit off track, as Google’s original plans were to present a good set of AI-related services and innovations, including its chatbot, at Google I/O 2023 last May. However, the large initial growth of ChatGPT and especially the announcement of the new Bing forced the search engine to postpone the announcement of its own chatbot to the beginning of February.

At the time, Microsoft confirmed its chatbot and started offering access to it very quickly, no doubt realizing that it was playing with an advantage over Google, which took about a month and a half to start offering access to Barda in a very limited way. It took May, as we originally expected, for the chatbot’s reach to expand substantially, and even a few more months before the service was finally available from Spain. However, In all these months, the service has improved a lotmaking it one of the most interesting services of this type today.

this of course it gives rise to those who seek to take advantage of it and overall also the popularity of the Google brand image. Already in the past we have seen the proliferation of apps, websites and others trying to capitalize on ChatGPT’s public image through impersonation, and as it could not be otherwise, there have been some similar moves in recent months, but in those where the image of the Bard used in a completely illegitimate way.

Actions in this sense obviously do not please the search engine, and the good news is that it has decided to respond. So as we can read on her official blog The Keyword, Google has reported copycats using Bard’s image to try to spread malware and from what they tell us, it’s not the first time. In fact, as we can read in the said publication, “We have filed approximately 300 related complaints since April.”

To carry out their scam, these cybercriminals «They created social media pages and ran ads encouraging people to “download” Bard, our generative AI tool.«, a service which, as you well remember, It is free and not downloadable, is used exclusively over the Internet. So with the false claim that they could have Bard “locally”, quite a few people downloaded the executable, which of course was not an offline version of the chatbot, but a pathogen that targeted the social media accounts of affected people.

With its lawsuit, Google intends to prevent these cybercriminals from re-registering domains on which to promote their fraudulent content, although reporting it has a second, at least as important, goal of to remind users that Bard is an online servicefree, accessible through its official url bard.google.com and cannot be downloaded for local use on PC, smartphone, etc.