It's a good one too!
From our experience, an avatar is commonly used in relation to information warfare operations and can be similarly compared to sockpuppets, or deep socially engineered identities that have the will to skew with the public opinion.
While you're professionally right, the term stuck to the image and video manipulation aspects to simplify the terminology for consumers and readers for the last 24 months.
And finding a cool name for the image frames that are generated through GAN's (generative adversarial networks) is a great idea...
Probably something as simple, and catchy, as deepfakes (which was ultimately linked to the initial user from github, if I remember correctly).
