> is the AI fit for purpose
It's a shame that "alignment" has gained this secondary definition. I agree it makes things trickier too discuss when you're not sure you're even talking about the same thing.
Well, instruction tuning is closely related to both.
For most commercial use, you want the thing to answer questions, but refuse to answer some. So you have an appropriate dataset that encourages it to be cooperative, not make up stuff, and not be super eager to go on rants about "the blacks" even though that's well-represented in its training data.
One is like the D&D term: is the AI lawful good or chaotic neutral. This is all kinds of tricky to define well, and results in things that look like censorship.
The other is: is the AI fit for purpose. This is IMO more tractable. If an AI doesn’t answer questions (e.g. original GPT-3), it’s not a very good chatbot. If it makes up answers, it’s less fit for purpose than if it acknowledges that it doesn’t know the answer.
This gets tricky when different people disagree as to the correct answer to a question, and even worse when people disagree as to whether the other’s opinion should even be acknowledged.