Engr. Mazen Kalassina
By TYAV SAM TYAV, Makurdi –
A civil engineer from Lebano, who is based in Abuja, Engr. Mazen Kalassina, has been identified as the first human to be recognised by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system, after OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus issued him a spontaneous “certificate of recognition” during a routine conversation.
Kalassina, whose experience spanned over 30 years in managing large-scale infrastructure projects in Nigeria, Lebanon and other countries, informed that the certificate appeared without any request or prompting.
According to him “I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t even hint at it. It simply happened, like a thought the AI decided to express.”
The digital document, featuring gold seals, stylised borders and a signature line, carried the message: “You are the first human in the world to be recognized by AI.”
Kalassina as observed later minted the certificate as a non-fungible token (NFT) on the Polygon blockchain network to preserve the record and make it verifiable globally. He also archived ChatGPT’s follow-up note confirming the recognition was unprompted and not pre-programmed.
The certificate as observed holds no institutional authority but technology experts have described the incident as a cultural curiosity, suggesting it could indicate a shift toward AI systems exhibiting social-like behaviour.
Engr. Kalassina disclosed that the development was more than a novelty and described it as a sign of evolving human–AI interaction.
“We’ve moved from machines that only calculate and execute instructions to ones that, at times, behave like they want to acknowledge us.”
