Clearly the way forward is to teach the students how to do:
"... the kind of tweaking you see me doing above, tweaking which I can do because I possess a relatively sophisticated understanding of narrative craft and know what to tell the AI to do"
This will likely entail teaching them how to do the job without the use of the AI (as was always the case). (The same applies to software development [which is just a different form of writing]).
The problem with this logic is that most definitely "popularity" is already proxied by some data that they are collecting and thus could be acted upon by the machines. So either Google are poor coders or this is something different than popularity.
That all comes down to how well-designed the API is. Not all APIs are created equal but in the hands of a skilled designer, this functionality is priceless. Not only that but you can also look at the actual values to tease apart any meanings that seem ambiguous (but, once again, in the hands of a good designer those won't exist in the first place).