I think one can say with confidence that nobody really wants to watch automatically generated title and clip art videos. Which means this trend will soon pass.
It is like a more advanced version of old school blackhat SEO scripts which would scrape content and then mash it up so it would appear original and unique to Google. In some cases these publishers may not even have real humans watching those ads.
Maybe they could try to apply this kind of technique to improve their auto-generated articles to the point where they can't be distinguished from those created by humans, and at the same time, fool the FB bots which filter the feeds.
If it reads like the "America InAction" definition of Corporate Robotocracy, feel good that it's least a more likely dystopian future than nuclear holocaust.
No, it's awful. In the "what media people like to consume" business that's still a useful metric.
To whom? Most people I know are more incensed at autoplaying video on their smartphones even more than on the desktop. Their audio is more likely to be turned up on their phone, and it's harder to turn it off, which is what most people immediately do.