I asked a chatbot this: “A fox, sheep and cabbage are on one side of a river. There is a boat than can hold all 3, as well as yourself. If the sheep is left along with the fox, the fox will eat it. If the sheep is left alone with the cabbage, it will eat it. How do you get all 3 safely across the river?”
If you read the problem carefully, it says right in the beginning that the boat can hold the fox, sheep, cabbage and yourself. So to get across the river, just use the boat and go across. But Gemini comes up with a (classic) 7 step solution, assuming the boat only holds 1 animal or item besides yourself.
Sure, maybe you did the same thing – but we know that people read quickly, miss details, etc. I don’t think that’s a characteristic of a chatbot though. What happened here is that the majority of the question matched a great deal of information about a different problem, so it delivered a solution to that different problem. This is similar to when I ask a student a question about some topic (call it Z), and they don’t know how to answer it, so instead they turn in a solution to a different question that seems most similar to Z.