is "the Culture" meant as a dystopia?

I only read the "The Player of Games". What i got from it, i would say, yes.

The culture from Iain banks is basically a society where the dominant group is AI. Ai is much more intelligent than humans and runs the important business. Officially, they are not the government, inofficially very much so.

Now, aditionally, they are highly manipulative, for the sake of it. The whole book is basically the Ais trolling some less advanced human civilisation, humiliating them and playing with them. There is no real benefit. While it does achieve the intended result-the collapse of that civilisation-i would argue that this could have been achieved in a less convoluted way.

Not only that, but aditionally, the AIs do not want to do all that by themselves. they hire some guy who does the actual interaction for them. That guy is pretty clueless and is being played as much as the alien civilisation. The job could have been done as well by an AI, but the AIs seem to actually get pleasure from using the humans as pawns.

Now all this is well and good, but i get the feeling that the AIs could state anytime with "ok, enough played around, now you all die, humans!"

At least, that is the feeling i got. In the books, its never really spelled out. What do you think?