Billionaire Toymaker Ronnen Harary + Why Prediction Markets Suck

**Ronnen Harary** (0:01)
Life is long, and you don't have to rush. And don't take yourself so seriously.
Don't take yourself so seriously. And really enjoy the journey. I think the most important thing is like, when you're younger, you're really trying to achieve, at least for myself. And I probably could have had more fun along the way.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:22)
The Amber Mac Show on Canada Talks, SiriusXM 167

**Amber Mac** (0:27)
Welcome to The Amber Mac Show, coming up on this week's episode. Jeff is going to take a deep dive into prediction markets and why almost 100% of traders lose. And we're also going to talk about the problem with Meta letting users make AI images from public Instagram profile pics.

**Jeff MacArthur** (0:44)
And our guest this week is one of the co-founders of Spin Master, a global children's entertainment company that's behind iconic brands, including PAW Patrol, Hatchimals, Air Hogs, and I'm sure you've heard of Rubik's Cube, but first, let's get into the headlines.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:00)
Headlines.

**Jeff MacArthur** (1:02)
Well, we're going to start off this week's news with a tip we hope all of you Instagram users follow up on.
Meta recently released their Muse Image AI Image Generation feature. And you can think what you want of that, but in a typically sleazy Meta fashion, what you may not have realized is that this launch also included a change to your Instagram settings that introduces permissions to allow other people to use your public Instagram content including your profile picture as part of their own AI creations. Permissions that are turned on by default with no notification or any ability to tell when somebody is using your content for their AI.

**Amber Mac** (1:43)
Before we talk about this a little bit more, I do want to share how exactly you turn this off and you should really turn this off.
Now, it looks like this is just for US users at the time. In fact, I just checked my account and I didn't see this option here. But keep an eye on your settings if you are outside of the US as I fully expect that this will expand to Canada and beyond. So the first step is go to your Instagram profile page in the app and then click on these three horizontal lines at the top of your profile. From there, scroll down to the, and I'm quoting here, allow people to use your content on Instagram with AI features on Meta, end quote, and then toggle off the settings for both posts and reels.

**Jeff MacArthur** (2:27)
And I'd like to just jump in here from a user experience angle and point out how completely awful Meta's implementation of toggles is, where an on toggle is just to the right of a black switch graphic, and the off toggle is to the left of the ever so slightly more gray switch graphic, with no other labeling indication at all to tell you whether it's on or off. So that's terrible for accessibility. I don't know how people with vision difficulties would see the difference between that black and the gray, but it's just another demonstration of how Meta so often fails at even the most basic design features.

**Amber Mac** (3:08)
It is such a good point, and I think we see this over and over again with many design features of Meta. But really, the bigger problem for me is obviously how tech companies over and over again are introducing new features and then opt in existing users with no clear indication that they've done so. This is the kind of thing that Jeff, I think it's fair to say, contributes to the mounting trust issues that many of us feel with these tech giants.
It would be so simple, especially in a platform like Instagram, where there are all sorts of alerts for all sorts of things, to just push an alert through to all affected users that said, hey, we've introduced a new setting and turned it on by default. If you'd like to turn it off, please click here. But that's just not how things are done anymore. And it shows along with the refusal to meaningfully deal with things like scam ads and online predators, how so many social media and tech companies, and I do want to call Meta out here because I think they're the worst, have no respect or empathy for the actual users that make their platforms popular in the first place.

**Jeff MacArthur** (4:20)
Yeah, the whole, we're the product thing. I think they look at us like how, well, they probably don't look at us even with the infinity that a farmer would look at a pig they're going to slaughter.