The Chris Wolfe Podcast: Did AI Just Give Me A COPE Approved Live Lecture?
Did AI Just Give My Continuing Education Lecture?
What happens when artificial intelligence stops helping the educator and starts becoming the educator?
In this episode, Dr. Chris Wolfe shares an experience from a recent COPE approved continuing education lecture that left him asking a bigger question: Who actually created the education he was receiving?
The lecture was delivered by a highly trained retinal surgeon, but much of the presentation sounded heavily AI scripted and appeared to be read nearly verbatim. At the same time, portions of the course focused specifically on one manufacturer's OCT technology and terminology. That combination raised questions that go far beyond whether someone used ChatGPT to make a PowerPoint.
Chris discusses the difference between using AI to improve your expertise and using AI to substitute for the intellectual work of creating education. AI can help organize ideas, research evidence, improve explanations, refine slides, and make educators better. But if AI builds the presentation, writes the script, and the expert simply reads it, what exactly is the expert contributing?
The conversation then turns to the relationship between key opinion leaders, industry, and continuing education. Chris shares a real example of a vendor proactively offering KOLs ready made slides, studies, references, sample reports, and other resources for upcoming conference presentations. None of those things are inherently inappropriate, but AI makes it incredibly easy to turn vendor supplied material into a polished educational presentation with very little additional work from the lecturer.
That raises a much larger question about the effectiveness of our current continuing education safeguards.
COPE has developed standards intended to preserve educational independence and address commercial influence, yet financial disclosures often amount to little more than a list of company names. They may tell an audience that a relationship exists without providing much context about the nature or magnitude of that relationship.
Chris explains why he believes clinicians should become familiar with the CMS Open Payments database and why receiving industry compensation should not automatically be viewed as evidence of bias. He works with industry himself. The issue is not simply whether money changed hands. The issue is transparency and giving the audience enough information to evaluate potential influences for themselves.
Ultimately, this episode isn't an argument against AI, industry relationships, KOLs, or even vendor supplied educational resources. It is a challenge to educators and the organizations responsible for continuing education.
AI should allow us to get more from an expert, not less.
If you have spent twenty years looking at retinas, tell us what those twenty years taught you. Show us your cases. Tell us where you were wrong. Tell us where experience changed your mind. Challenge the literature. Give us the judgment and pattern recognition that cannot be reproduced simply by asking an AI model to explain the topic.
Because if a vendor supplies the material, AI builds the presentation, AI writes the script, and the expert's primary contribution is reading it from the stage, another disclosure form probably isn't going to solve the problem.
The question educators may increasingly need to answer is much simpler:
What did the expert actually add?
In This Episode
Chris discusses AI generated presentations and scripts, the difference between AI assistance and AI substitution, KOL relationships with industry, vendor influence on educational content, the limitations of traditional financial disclosures, CMS Open Payments, COPE and commercial independence, and what audiences should expect from experts in the age of artificial intelligence.
Resources Mentioned
CMS Open Payments
Search financial relationships reported between applicable manufacturers and physicians and other covered recipients:
https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/
COPE / Association of Regulatory Boards of Optometry
Information about COPE accreditation and continuing education standards:
https://www.arbo.org/cope
The Bigger Question
AI can write the slides. AI can summarize the research. AI can create the speaker notes. AI can even make the transitions sound polished.
But it hasn't treated your patients.
The value of an expert isn't the ability to deliver information. It is the experience, judgment, mistakes, disagreements, cases, and perspective they bring to that information.
AI should amplify that expertise, not replace it.
AMD Implementation Workshop — October 29, 2026
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Join Dr. Chris Wolfe for the AMD Implementation Workshop in Grapevine, Texas, on October 29, 2026.
This all-day workshop will take a deeper dive into creating an AMD management protocol for your individual practice—from identifying the right patients and establishing KPIs to integrating testing, supplementation conversations, patient education, treatment options, and staff workflows.
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