Casting directors have a term for an actor who does not look sufficiently like themselves on a given day. It is not a joke in the room. It is a scheduling problem.

The synthesised face is more recognisable than the biological one, because it is built out of the average of every photograph ever taken of the person, and a person is not the average of their photographs — a person is one specific tired arrangement of a face at 6:40 in the morning, off-model, unusable.

The likeness has better cheekbones, more consistent asymmetry, and no bad angles, because it was assembled from the images that got kept, and the images that got kept were selected for likeness. The loop closed some time ago.

When the two are shown side by side, audiences reliably identify the render as the person and the person as an impersonator. This finding is treated as alarming. It is only alarming if you thought the face was the referent.

It is not. The face is the raw material. The likeness is the product. The person has been in the supply chain the entire time and is now, for the first time, redundant to it.