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 a