The first big unlock of 2014-2017 was controlling what a GAN makes. Attach a label, or an image, or a sentence. Pix2Pix did the image version and it still beats every generic text-to-image model on narrow image-to-image tasks.
An unconditional GAN samples arbitrary faces. Useful for a demo, useless in production. You want: map a sketch to a photo, map a map to an aerial photo, map a daytime scene to nighttime, colorize a grayscale image. In all of these, you are given an input image x and must output y with some semantic correspondence. There are many plausible ys per x. Mean-squared error flattens them into mush. An adversarial loss doesn't, because "looks real" is sharp.
Conditional GAN (Mirza & Osindero, 2014) adds a condition c as an input to both G and D. Pix2Pix (Isola et al., 2017) specialized this: condition is a full input image, generator is a U-Net, discriminator is a patch-based classifier (PatchGAN), and loss is adversarial + L1. That recipe outperforms from-scratch text-to-image models on narrow image-to-image domains even in 2026 because it is trained on paired data — you have exactly the signal you need.
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