Are SEO article writers like battery hens?

We've heard about factories pumping out SEO articles, and now they're in my face. Inescapable: truckloads of garbage web content churned out by slave web content writers. I picture them caged like battery hens, pecking randomly on keywords in a database, assembling sentences in their gut and laying 100 'articles' per day.

I feel sorry for these writers and I'm sure no amount of training from Contented.com would make the slightest difference to their lives or the quality of their writing.

But perhaps these queasy-making quasi-articles are produced by machines or software, not writers, in which case compassion is misplaced.

Last week I had idly set up a Google alert for the very vague term 'web content', and now every daily email includes alerts like this:

Looking At Unskilled Web Content Writers Versus Professional ...
Search by Author, Title or Content. Article Content, Author Name, Article
Title ... Unskilled web content writers, on the other hand, may indeed be
good ...
http://goarticles.com/article/Looking-At-Unskilled-Web-Content-Writers-Versus-Professional-Freelance-Copywriters/4019378/

Click the link and you get meaningless words tumbled together like this:

Today, writers play an of import part in the online selling world. They are rendering best quality info to their clients about different types of goods and services that are offered by different companies. The authors use a certain shape of writing style, which looks different from the other website subject.

The intention is for such pages to be recognized by Google as genuine, original, serious web content, giving weight to a link to another web site:
http://contentdesigner.co.in/

The proud claim of Content Designer is:

We are doing 100% unique content writing, 0% grammar mistake and use high priority keywords

And here we go: Yuwanda Black has written an SEO article for SEO article writers about writing SEO articles. (See how cunningly I loaded that enchanting sentence with keywords?)
Get $100 Per SEO Article: How to Become a Highly Paid SEO Writer

Jeff Atwood and other web commentators fear Google is broken. If so, SEO article factories helped to break it.

Image via FoodJunta.com