Gentoo bans AI-created contributions

You forgot one intermediate, which is what they were doing right before LLMs came along - many-to-one chatting. The idea is that each CSR is in four or five (or maybe more, I don't really know the specifics) chats at once, and doing manual timesharing between them (i.e. looking at this chat for a few seconds, then looking at the next one, etc.). Whenever a response is due, they have a series of canned replies they can quickly input (presumably with copy and paste and/or some bespoke software), and most of those are more polite ways of saying "I'll get back to you in a minute," but often phrased in a way that makes it sound like the CSR is doing something other than juggling several chats at once (such as pulling up your file or consulting internal documentation).

You can tell that you're dealing with this kind of customer support based on the following:

1. They subtly encourage you to chat rather than getting on the phone (e.g. the phone has a longer wait time, they won't just give you a phone number and require you to fill out a form first, the phone has one of those awful voice-response menu thingies, etc.).
2. The chat has a queue, but it rarely takes more than a few minutes.
3. Every time you send a message to the CSR, it takes 5-10 seconds (sometimes longer) before they reply.
4. When they do reply, their reply does not meaningfully advance the conversation, and you have to wait another 5-10 seconds for them to give you a real reply.
5. Everything they say reads like it was meticulously proofread and approved in advance by some committee. There are never abbreviations, typos, missing capitalization or punctuation, or other common hallmarks of "real" chatting.

The obvious problem here is that this is much "safer" than using an LLM (see for example the Air Canada fiasco where their chatbot made up a policy and the company was forced to honor it), while simultaneously being relatively cheap (you don't need as many CSRs because they're multiplexed over several chats at once) and providing an experience that is not that much worse than an LLM can provide (the CSRs responses are already grammatically correct and professional, because they've been pre-vetted, so the most the LLM can do is cutting out the "give me a moment" intermediate replies).