Pretty sure they meant that LLM companies can easily scrape Lemmy and train models off of the posts without any authorization. Its freely, publicly accessible(until, you know, they end up DDoSing these poorly funded instances out of existence by scraping them).

Your info is a bit out of date. Epic already sold off Bandcamp back in 2023 during layoffs. Its owned by Songtradr now, who I personally know nothing about.

Checked the authors website; watermark made searching for it easy. They have been using this consistent art style since 2021. They have been posting art to Twitter since 2011.

Don’t know what in this comic you could possibly see as a give away for AI use.

I don’t know why you are so insistent that everyone who mentions Windows is using a online account, but you actually do not need a google account to use an android device in most cases. I have been using android phones with no logged in account, with side loaded app stores and independent apps for years. Maybe the mainline flagship devices enforce it; I haven’t had that problem personally.

Google would really like to crack down on installing software without their permission, and they still track every bit of information they can with the Google Play API even without an account, but I digress. I haven’t had a google account in several years. Or a Microsoft account either, for that matter.

On top of using include mode, be sure to go into Qbittorrents settings and bind the network interface to the VPN. That will ensure that even if the VPN is disconnected or turned off for some reason, Qbit will not attempt to communicate on clear net. Some people would rely on Proton VPNs kill switch feature for that, but that is not available with split tunneling.