I saw this: http://www.articlepostrobot.com/ and I know that is totally against Google's way of working but if you did use a more automated tool such as that, but tweaked it and only used it in moderation so that things still looked natural, would that be alright?
This is nothing new, I've seen article robots since early 00s. Probably one of the reasons articles have somewhat diminished in value. I posted something interesting you might find of value: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=something&btnG=Google+Search I believe mass spamming of articles and submissions wont bring value to your site. Instead, concentrate on putting out 1 quality/informative article per week.
There are other techniques to get backlinks like directories, forums,blogs.you can submit one article to different article directories but placed link of your site in author biography.
I have used Article Post Robot for a while now. It saves me a ton of time and it saves my wrists from a lot of unnecessary copy & pasting. For the most part I still have to use that program on 'manual submission' mode to choose correct categories. I probably haven't been using the software long enough to see how the search engines respond to the large number of low ranking links. I am a little worried though as the volume of links will look somewhat unnatural. Also some of the article directories eventually go black hat leaving you with a bunch of links from a bad neighborhood site.