When I turned 28, I wrote about my exit from the so-called 27 Club, that infamous group of young talents who expired before reaching the age I just had. In doing so, I noted that there may not actually be such a group, statistically speaking, and argued that romanticizing an early death was mistaken. Even so, I wrote:

It’s hard to deny the cultural power of the 27 Club. It serves as a seemingly perfect representation of youth cut down in its prime, with an added tinge that these particular members yielded themselves entirely to a kind of reckless excess that seemed inseparable from their talent. They seemed incapable of living lives of anything but extremes, and that can only go on for so long. As the line from Blade Runner goes, “the candle that burns twice as bright, burns half as long.” The power of the 27 Club as an idea is reinforced by one’s simple inability to imagine its members as any older than the age at which they perished. Kurt Cobain, if alive today, would now be 54; who can project his quintessentially ’90s demeanor into the present? Jim Morrison would be 78; would he be joining his fellow Boomer acts in reprising his greatest hits — including his notoriously unpredictable onstage behavior — on Social Security? It’s hard to fathom.

Well, someone has done the fathoming for us. Look here to find AI-aided projections of what famous talents who expired young, from Jimi Hendrix to Elvis Presley, might have looked like today. Not all of the subjects of these projections died at an age as young as 27, but it is still striking to see them aged. Hendrix as an elder statesman of rock, like Mick Jagger or some such, just seems . . . wrong. Kurt Cobain as a 50-something-year-old Gen-Xer appears woefully out of place. And the depiction of “Silver Fox” Elvis is welcome, but perhaps generous, given his condition at the time of his death.

It’s amusing to imagine, at any rate.