I don't think of this as "we really wanted the ability to synthesize faces, this was very important to us as a civilization." Rather, I think of it as "if we c

I don't think of this as "we really wanted the ability to synthesize faces, this was very important to us as a civilization." Rather, I think of it as "if we create an AGI, it will have required the ability to imagine things. Also, we have huge datasets of faces that all sorta point the right way and have a good medium of feature complexity, and we're extremely specialized in spotting visual errors in faces." Consider the similar if slightly smaller research in creating photos of living rooms. (Or OpenAI's famous "comfy chair in the shape of an avocado.") Same reasoning. It's not about faces, faces just have beneficial properties.