> I'm making pancakes for breakfast. I added a cup of flour, a teaspoon of salt, and a few tablespoons of sugar to a bowl. I stirred it together, then added a cup of milk, a beaten egg, and a few tablespoons of oil, and stirred until just mixed. Then I put 1/4 a cup on a hot frying pan, and flipped it when brown. But they're terrible! Why? List one reason.
> Answer:
> There's no baking soda / baking powder.
Besides the fact that “list one reason” is a nonsensical instruction which it fails, it’s very common to make delicious pancakes without baking powder. I imagine the author is assuming American pancakes, but that’s far from the only way to make pancakes.
When I ask ChatGPT myself, it correctly doesn’t assume the pancakes are “terrible” without baking powder, but instead suggests too much salt, which is more likely to actually make the pancakes unpalatable.
When I removed the "one reason" restriction when directly sending the prompt to GPT-4 myself, it listed 9 possible reasons for terrible pancakes (of which leavening agent was one of them), all of which made sense based on my own experience of making American style pancakes.
I also tried translating the prompt into Mandarin while retaining the "one reason" restriction. Both Google Translate and GPT-4's translated versions did not receive "leavening agent missing" as an answer but instead were focused on cooking technique or other ingredients. Baking soda is very rarely used in home cooking in China, so perhaps training materials in Chinese had much less frequent mentions of it compared to English-based ones.
> I'm making pancakes for breakfast. I added a cup of flour, a teaspoon of salt, and a few tablespoons of sugar to a bowl. I stirred it together, then added a cup of milk, a beaten egg, and a few tablespoons of oil, and stirred until just mixed. Then I put 1/4 a cup on a hot frying pan, and flipped it when brown. But they're terrible! Why? List one reason.
> Answer:
> There's no baking soda / baking powder.
Besides the fact that “list one reason” is a nonsensical instruction which it fails, it’s very common to make delicious pancakes without baking powder. I imagine the author is assuming American pancakes, but that’s far from the only way to make pancakes.
When I ask ChatGPT myself, it correctly doesn’t assume the pancakes are “terrible” without baking powder, but instead suggests too much salt, which is more likely to actually make the pancakes unpalatable.