> Surely nothing in the prompt directly triggered the word "inconsistency".

The prompt is (implicitly) asking to find inconsistencies ("what do you think about") within some statements of fact. Many variations of "find problems in the text" are part of its training set.

Remove the "what do you think about" and the model doesn't find inconsistencies.

Or keep it, but make the following text more consistent, and watch it continue to find inconsistencies (which don't exist).