It's interesting that it maybe took a few months, but I know by that winter of 2015 Dr. Fei-Fei Li had a course at Stanford where GANs were at least mentioned. And I think that helped get some attention to them.
Peter Bauman, Ian Goodfellow on Inventing GANs
And afterwards, I got together at Stanford with some computer musicians to talk about things. And the discussion came up of, will we see real PCs in our lifetime? In our lifetime. And these were highly knowledgeable people.
David Em, 1980s Computer Art: Mark Wilson, David Em, Dan Sandin