A writer, my wife actually, got in that same argument and ended up leaving over it. They were buying work from a second party producer (one who bought and stole work from other writers offering a pittance of a dollar or asking for work as a "test" article.) Since their minimum payment is $3, this second party producer was making a lot of money doing nothing but posting work. Sometimes, she probably made more. AC pays an average of $8 to seasoned writers but is known to give up to $14.
For writers, they hound on 2.3% keyword density using
Text analysis, wordcount, keyword density analyzer, prominence analysis. When my wife asked for them to step up and run work through a site to test for plagiarism, they balked and stood behind it being the writer's fault if they plagiarise. The Internet is still the wild west.
The scary thing is some writers are just cutting and pasting pieces of articles found all over the net, and AC is buying. Personally, my wife knows someone who does just that. The last straw for her was the fact that some guy was selling AC videos made from the rides inside of disneyland and from the grounds, and AC insisted they are still compliant to Internet copyrights. AS if! I'm a stock photographer and filming the eifel tower, cadilac ranch, and any speck of dirt at Disneyland is a NO NO.
You know, infringing copyright can get your whole site banned from google.
My fear is that AC will sell stolen work to the wrong person and they will get in trouble. I dunno. It's a rats nest for sure.