Knowing the state of the job market is critical to finding your next position - a new report aims to take out the guesswork by revealing the most in-demand worldwide. Experts compiled internet data and Google job searches to create a list of the top 10 most sought-after positions, ranking software quality assurance analyst at the top. A software quality assurance analyst, someone that tests software to ensure it is free of bugs, saw a 155 percent increase in searchers from 2021 to 2022. The second most searched was solar consultant, who provided customers with information about solar-powered equipment, and customer service associate. However, the report was conducted before AI's success, which is set to take over many positions, and the recent tech layoffs that saw thousands of people lose their jobs.

TikTok may soon let you create AI stylized avatars not unlike what you can with deep learning apps like Midjourney or Lensa, according to a Twitter thread from social media guru Matt Navarra seen by The Verge. Called AI Avatars, the tool lets you upload three to 10 photos of yourself and choose from five art styles. It will then generate up to 30 separate avatars in a couple of minutes. You can then download one, several or all of the images to use as a profile picture or in stories. Though the styles are more limited than what you can get on Lensa, the results look pretty good -- so the feature is bound to be popular.

With only one swipe, users of the all-in-one photo editing tool Lensa can enhance facial retouching, replace and blur out backdrops, add borders to images, and more. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

The vilification of AI is prominent in certain groups, with many thinking AI will replace human beings. Thankfully, the reality is that AI gives us humans countless benefits. The misconception of AI being sentient or a machine version of a human comes from science fiction and similar media. It is usually portrayed as a robot gaining sentience and pursuing shenanigans such as eliminating the human populace. In contrast, it is just a hyper-capable program that can better combine data with intelligent algorithms to produce an outcome. Currently, more than half of all corporate recruitment firms, such as Lensa, use AI to magnify the industry's potential for recruitment.

A picture may be worth a thousand words. But what about a picture generated entirely by a machine? That is the question scholars, advocates, and internet users have been considering lately, as art generated by artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded in popularity. Some commentators have asked who regulates this digitally created art and whether the courts can prevent theft of creative ideas and techniques in the process of its generation. Toward the end of last year, popular use of the Lensa AI app, which generates stylized portraits based on users' uploaded selfies, spurred the latest round of controversy over the ethics of AI-generated art.

Artificial intelligence is not only altering the course of the internet but also impacting the future of business. While some fear that it will have harmful economic repercussions by replacing people in jobs, AI can also serve as a game-changing tool to grow a business and increase its efficiency -- help with everything from lead generation to content creation. Launched by OpenAI in November of 2022, this chatbot amassed more than a million users in just five days. A generative dialogue AI application, it can create new content, and its potential uses are virtually endless -- from writing full essays to blog posts, song lyrics to cover letters and resumes. It can even draft legal contracts using local statutes/regulations pulled from public sources.

Friends are morphing into fairy princesses and astronauts. TV scripts, poetry and cover letters are being written by a bot that sounds a whole lot like a real human. Artificial intelligence is having a moment, with people using new tools to show off just how advanced AI has gotten. As NPR's Bobby Allyn reports, these tools are showcasing the power and the peril of the current state of AI. BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: There are two crazes taking the internet by storm right now.

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has slowed down. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to multiple year-end reports. Global spending across iOS and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps. This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more.

This year, it feels like artificial intelligence-generated art has been everywhere. In the summer, many of us entered goofy prompts into DALL-E Mini (now called Craiyon), yielding a series of nine comedically janky AI-generated images. But more recently, there's been a boom of AI-powered apps that can create cool avatars. MyHeritage AI Time Machine generates images of users in historical styles and settings, and AI TikTok filters have become popular for creating anime versions of people. This past week, "magic avatars" from Lensa AI flooded social media platforms like Twitter with illustrative and painterly renderings of people's headshots, as if truly made by magic. These avatars, created using Stable Diffusion -- which allows the AI to "learn" someone's features based off of submitted images -- also opened an ethical can of worms about AI's application.

If you've noticed an influx of illustrated selfies--depicting people as fairy princesses, astronauts, and anime characters--popping up across social media in recent weeks, you're not alone. These AI-generated images are the product of digital editing app Lensa's new "Magic Avatars" feature, a tool that uses machine learning to create stylized portraits based on photos provided by users. Lensa has been around since 2018, but started skyrocketing in popularity when Magic Avatars launched in late November. The app saw around 13.5 million worldwide installs in the first 12 days of December, more than six times the 2 million it saw in November, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower. Consumers also spent approximately $29.3 million in the app during that 12-day period, Sensor Towers reports.