"Use a tool to verify the date if needed" that's a good idea, yes. And the answers I got are based on UTC, so 23:06 PDT should match the 23. for Europe.

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 worth it.

Heh, I've always been neurodivergent enough that I've never been great at 'normal human' questions. I commonly add a lot of verbosity. This said it's worked out well talking to computer based things like search engines.

LLMs on the other hand are weird in ways we don't expect computers to be. Based upon the previous prompting, training datasets, and biases in the model a response to something like "What time is dinner" can all have the response "Just a bit after 5", "Quarter after 5" or "Dinner is at 17:15 CDT". Setting ones priors can be important to performance of the model, much in the same way we do this visually and contextually with other humans.

All that said, people will find AI problematic for the foreseeable future because it behaves somewhat human like in responses and does so with confidence.