I should know the answer to this because I re-read all the Culture novels last year, but I do think there's some genetic engineering in the Culture. There's the famous sex glands, of course (but maybe the neural net handles part of that too?) and then there's the asocial dude on the remote asteroid in Excession, who I believe was seen as a genetic throwback from the general population.
But it's beside the point, Banks probably included genetic engineering to make sure no-one got horrible diseases and could live to 500 years, not to breed a separate race of elites. And for that he can never be forgiven by these idiots.
Edit both HN and LW comments mention John C Wright, who I have never read and vaguely remembered being a Sad Puppy. He has some dreck where everything is libertarian. Banks was a socialist, but he was foremost a novelist. Faced with the need to create a future society, he naturally designed one with no disease, no material wants, and lots and lots of sex. Who wouldn't? Conservative yanks, that's who.
While the Culture is, on pretty much any axis, strictly superior to modern civilization, what personally appalls me is their sheer deathism.
If memory serves, the average human lives for around 500 years before opting for euthanasia, mostly citing some kind of ennui. What the hell? 500 years is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
"Why didn't Iain take my neuroses into account??"
Marvelous! This makes more sense of the culture than the books do.
I mean it's still just funny money seeing the creator works for some company that resells tokens from Claude, but very few people are stepping back to note the drastically reduced expectations of LLMs. A year ago, it would have been plausible to claim that a future LLM could design a language from scratch. Now we have a rancid mess of slop, and it's an "art project", and the fact it's ersatz internally coherent is treated as a great success.
Willison should just have let this go, because it's a ludicrous example of GenAI, but he just can't help himself defending this crap.
Promptfondlers on lobste.rs are unhappy about the tag "vibecoding", used to denote development using GenAI. I'd not recommend reading the thread, just want to observe that if slop coding had actually taken the coding world by storm, I doubt there would be much pearl clutchign about how slop-slingers are treated on the site. We're talking about people willing to pay Scam Altman money monthly after all.
Absolutely amazing. They're not even pretending anymore.