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.
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.