Sure.
The main slogan of Google now sounds like: "make sites for real people". If you got it right, you already know how to make a quality self-populating sites which won't be penalized by Google.
In the post-Panda era Google does not care too much about your content (how big your articles are, how many keywords there etc). The most important factor is your visitors' behavior. If your visitors love your site then Google will automatically consider it "as made for real people" depending on on various behavioral factors like bounce rate, on site time, depth of browsing, % of bookmarkers, etc.
Thus the most important thing is to make the surfers stay at your site longer and come back again and again.
Just a year ago it was a common practice to order a bunch of "unique" but boring and useless articles from 3rd-world copywriters and post them to a poor-looking blog with some boring or even default design. Now this won't fly because such sort of sites will have an off-scale bounce rate, and of course they will be penalized by Google as a low quality one.
On the other hand, a well-designed self-populating site which syndicates quality and properly sorted content such as images, videos, online games etc, will catch the surfers for a long time. In such a case the search engines won't care if your content is "unique" or not. Because if the visitors love your site then it's "made for the real people". Yes, it is that simple!
Now the most important advice: Keep away from ANY automation software which allows you to create a site using predefined templates, content sources and methods. Such scripts (plugins) may look very handy (click these two buttons to build a site and fill it out with the content), but that's just a road to nowhere. The site you'll build with such a script will be the same as those 1000000's ones that were already generated for others, and of course you will be banned. Only professional solutions rule in post-Panda era. Every auto-site must be unique and really interesting for the surfers.