My reasoning for the plain question was: as people start to replace search engines by AI chat, I thought that asking "plain" questions to see how trustworthy the answers might be, would be a good test. Because plain folks will ask plain questions and won't think about the subtle details. They would not expect a "precise number" either, i.e. not 23:06 PDT, but would like to know if this weekend would be fine for a trip or the previous or next weekend would be better to book a "dark sky" tour.
And, BTW, I thought that LLMs are computers too ;-0
I think its much better to help people learn that an LLM is "not" a computer (even if it technically is).
Thinking its a computer makes you do dumb things with them that they simply have never done a good job with.
Build intuitions about what they do well and intuitions about what they don't do well and help others learn the same things.
Don't encourage people to have poor ideas about how they work, it makes things worse.
Would you ask an LLM a phone number? If it doesn't use a function call the answer is simply not worth having.