It seems to be the latter. In fact, the trick (should I say, fraud?) is so common that they were even several articles about it in the press over the past two or three years. Even the famous x.ai had (and I guess still has) humans doing the work.
A couple of weeks ago such a startup based in London contacted me on LinkedIn - the product really hyped AI, but it all seemed very dubious. My guess was it was really a mix of a simple chatbot with a Mechanical Turk-style second line.
