My personal feeling in regards to Autoblogging is that its crap!
That being said, you can 100% sure find some that are highly successful, but I am fairly sure they are old, and build trust and an audience before everyone started to do them in 2015 or something like that..
However, all is not sh**, as I now will turn the tables a little..
I actually own a fairly new Autoblog that I am building automatically as we speak.
Why would I do that if I just complained that its sh**?..
Because I am building a library of content, on the site, and at some point in the future I will possibly be making a serious online newspaper, Not passive!
I think that just having the site be live, and running the curated content is of no value to Google, and you will never rank on it, but your site is indexed, and maybe you can get a few readers, so when you (or me in this example) later will be building a serious newspaper (non-English, and no low-quality content), I will be in a situation where I have the site indexed, and possibly a few readers, that like the site.
So in the end, if your question is if you can spend an afternoon building an auto blog, and expect to make money on the answer is 100% no way you will make money.
But you can, however, spend an afternoon and set up an Autoblog and leave it, only to come back to it in 3 months, and most likely have an indexed site with a few readers that you can more easily build a serious business around,
100% passive (I will claim that's the case with auto blogging) is 100% waste of time,
I use a plugin from Codecanyon I found here in Babiato, called Autoblog or something..