Yeah. Google has spent years taking the position that extremely thin content generated at a massive scale involving no genuine research or insight is spam that should be penalised. Now it's writing software to do just this.

I think this may be a misconception on Google's stance on content generated at a massive scale. They dock you for text spinner type content, stuff with little variation, nonsense phrasing, and identical sentences pieced together in different articles from the same source. Content generated at massive scales that are actually useful and disseminated from multiple publishers (like local news sources) are what they don't punish.

Maybe they're doing it to train their spam story detection algorithms?