Worth pointing out the main criticism of GANs, which is that right now researchers don't really have a way to tell if a GAN is just copying and pasting the training data or not (there is no "test set" unlike in supervised learning). And in fact an ideal GAN could just learn to output the training set. One example someone found in the generated images for this model: https://twitter.com/nalkalchbrenner/status/92401333…
My interpretation of this "problem" is that it's a radically efficient solution to the problem of generating content in absence of outside reinforcement. Said another way: If we gave a human the task of: [make a painting of a bridge] using a handful of examples of bridges as inspiration, and they did a 1-1 copy of one of them, it would be the most efficient result. However there is generally a culturally implied task…
Copying pictures is not efficient within the scope of this problem. The whole point of these algorithms is to extract (or ideally understand) essential features of some class of objects and to be able to represent an object of such class with radically smaller amounts of data that would be required for the full description.
That is the only definition of efficiency that matters here.