Two women, one name
In May I looked myself up in a model and found an Elfie from yesterday. That story is in my last insight. Ever since, one question has stayed with me: what does the model actually hold of me? Not one person. Two.
One blogs about sustainability, develops recipes for organic brands and organizes clean-ups. The other writes about AI, communication and personal brands. Both are called Elfie Schürfeld-Todor. Both are documented, linked and crawlable.
There is nothing unusual about this. It happens to anyone who has changed and left traces along the way. The lawyer who wrote about concerts in her early twenties. The consultant who appears in the local paper as a track and field athlete. As long as humans were describing us, this was not a problem. People ask questions. They put things in context.
Now something else describes us. And there is a word for it that sounds more harmless than it is: entity.
A term from the world of databases
Entity sounds like a philosophy seminar. But the term comes from computer science: a uniquely identifiable thing about which a system stores statements. In 2012, Google introduced the Knowledge Graph. Its head of search, Amit Singhal, summed up the idea in three words: “things, not strings”. A name was no longer meant to be a string of characters, but a thing. A node in a network, with edges to other nodes.
Since then, this has applied to people too. To a model, I am a node. Edges extend from me: to topics, places, sources and other names. What hangs from that node determines what a model answers when someone enters my name.
An entity is not a person. It is what remains of one when you make them machine-readable.
The next transfer
I wrote my bachelor’s thesis on whether the concept of a brand can be applied to people. The answer was yes, on one condition: a person needs a mediator who makes them visible. And a brand is strong when self-image and public image align.
The brand was always an image. It lived in people’s minds, built from impressions, memories and attributions. An image could be turned around: new pictures, new stories, new stages.
The entity does not live in people’s minds. It lives in systems, and it consists of documents. You can impress a mind. You can only substantiate a graph. The human as a brand becomes the human as a dataset.
A person develops. An entity accumulates.
A person changes by living. They do not have to document anything to do so. An entity changes only through documentation. What is not written, linked and confirmed does not exist for it.
People tell their lives as stories. Stories have chapters, and chapters can be closed.
An index cannot do that. In it, all documented versions coexist. The old one does not disappear when a new one emerges. It sits beside it. What shifts is the weight.
The two Elfies are therefore not a fault in the system. They are the system.
And the index holds more. In December 2017, the airline NIKI went bankrupt and cancelled our flights to La Gomera. We went anyway: 4,600 kilometres, 145 hours, by car through Spain to the Canary Islands, Christmas Eve on the ferry. Bild reported it, followed by RTL, oe24 and a travel industry news service. Eight years later, that one week hangs from my node as one of its best-documented edges. Not because that one adventure defined my life, but because four newsrooms wrote about it.
An entity does not weigh by importance. It weighs by the available sources.
Two Elfies, one question
So far, it sounds as though the two Elfies were a problem the index created for me. But that is not quite true. Because, fundamentally, there are not two of them.
One was concerned with sustainability, nutrition and health. Her question is still mine: how we preserve what sustains us. The other writes about AI.
Sustainability and AI are not a contradiction.
Protecting the environment matters as much to me today as it did then. Sustainability needs development. Going back to the Stone Age is no solution. Health, longevity, saving our legacy: we will not solve these questions with our intelligence alone. We may need a more advanced intelligence by our side.
And the craft never went away. Strategy, content, storytelling. Thinking yourself into other people’s lives, sensing what they need, understanding which headlines they read and which stories carry them. I did this for brands and, over the past year, for political actors. Now I do it for the question of how humans and AI read one another.
Anyone reading this sees a biography with a connecting thread. An index that cannot read it anywhere sees two entities. The difference is a document. This one, for example.
Edges cannot be deleted. Nodes can be connected.
The direction is mine. The index does not know it yet.
I have chosen a direction: I write about communication, visibility, reputation and personal brands in the age of AI. That direction is a decision, and it is mine. The index knows no decisions. It knows the available sources.
So I follow it, text by text. Not to erase an earlier version of myself. That cannot be done, and it would be wrong: she was me, and without her, today’s work would not exist. But so that the version I put my name to today gains the same substance: written, substantiated, findable. I do not decide when the node reflects this. I only decide what I give it to read.
What remains
What remains of a person when a model describes them? The documented subset. The rest continues to exist: the contradictions, the unwritten, the development between two documents. Just not there.
Because I am not two women. I am one, and I am many: strategist, writer, mother, wife, sister, friend. One of them even has a name of her own. Which one belongs to her for now. Of all this, the index knows two versions. Not the most important. The best documented.
And rarely does just one remain. Every version ever documented remains. Side by side, with no date of farewell.
A human closes chapters. An index knows none.
How many versions of you live in your entity? And is it written anywhere how they belong together?
Sources and image credits
Own foundation
- Schürfeld-Todor, E. (2016). Der Mensch als Marke. Eine Untersuchung zur Übertragbarkeit des Markenbegriffs auf den Menschen (The human as brand name. A survey on the transferability of brand name to humans). Bachelor’s thesis.
- Related insight: Personal brands between attention and findability (May 30, 2026). That essay examines the mechanism: what a model finds and weighs. This one asks the question beneath it: what is the thing it holds of us?
Concept and technology
- Singhal, A. (2012). Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings. Google Official Blog, May 16, 2012.
- Herbst, D. (ed.) (2003). Der Mensch als Marke. Konzepte, Beispiele, Experteninterviews. Göttingen.
Press reports on the NIKI edge
- Bild (December 2017), RTL, oe24 (December 27, 2017), Reise vor9 (January 2, 2018).
Image credits
- Header: concept and composition: Elfie Schürfeld-Todor. Portrait, one half a face, the other an index trail dissolving into characters and nodes. Title line: “Der Mensch als Entität.” Bauhaus minimalism, brand palette of violet and white on black. Editing of my own photograph with ChatGPT, based on my own briefing, using the visual identity and previous header images as style references. Photorealistic composite, therefore labelled.
- Image: AI-edited composite with ChatGPT, based on my own photograph. (Labelled in anticipation of EU AI Act Art. 50.)
Method
- This insight was written in dialogue between me and an AI model. The theses, the position and the selection are mine. The model was a sparring partner and co-author. It sharpened, contradicted, suggested sources and delivered drafts I reworked. Quotes and references are cross-checked. Augmentation, not automation.