Justin Visser
6b2cbd5728
The idea table now shows 83/69/18 (the soft-program default) with a 'who you teach matters more than how many' framing; the model section describes the forwarding composite (baseline, raised by novelty, lowered by harm awareness) and the soft education lever instead of the old fixed-rate / never-forward wording. Background acknowledges the team's literature sourcing of the parameters and frames this demo as the accessible layer of the funded instrument (calibration, full parameters, optimisation). Preset About copy updated to match.
7 KiB
spreadlab
An agent-based "what if" dashboard for a hard question: when harmful content (the modelled case: a non-consensual deepfake) starts spreading through a school year group, where does a limited education budget actually make a difference?
It is the proof-of-concept tool for a university grant proposal on protecting minors from AI-generated non-consensual imagery in an open society.
Live demo: https://aios-demo.justinvisser.org
Illustrative, not validated. spreadlab is a planning and discussion aid. The model is a deliberately simple social-contagion simulation; its numbers are not predictions about real schools, real platforms, or real incidents, and must not be used as such.
The idea
Schools can rarely reach everyone with a prevention program. spreadlab runs the same outbreak in the same simulated social network under different education strategies, so the only thing that changes is who gets educated. With the default world (120 students, educate 30% of them):
| Strategy | Reached by the fake |
|---|---|
| No program | 83% |
| Educate 30% at random | 69% |
| Educate the 30% best-connected | 18% |
Same budget, very different outcomes: educating at random barely dents the spread, while educating the best-connected students contains it to under a fifth of the school. Who you teach matters more than how many. Making that lever visible (and later: searching for the best intervention under a budget) is the point of the tool.
How the model works
- Network: Holme-Kim preferential attachment with triangle closure
(Holme & Kim, 2002), producing the hubs and clustered friend groups of
real social networks; a port of networkx's
powerlaw_cluster_graph. - Spread: an independent cascade (Kempe, Kleinberg & Tardos, 2003). Each student's chance of forwarding is a literature-grounded composite: a baseline rate, raised by how novel or shocking the fake is, lowered by the year group's ambient harm awareness. Per-edge random draws are shared across all scenarios, so strategies are compared in the same world. Because deepfake-specific data are scarce, the parameters are sensitivity ranges rather than fitted values, drawn from the project team's literature review.
- Education lever: the program cuts an educated student's forwarding probability by its effect size (a strong but imperfect reduction, not a perfect wall). Strategies pick who is educated: no program, uniform random, or the most-connected students.
- Determinism: every source of randomness flows from seeds in the config; identical configs produce identical results, pinned by tests.
Status
Early development; interface and API are not stable yet.
- Simulation engine in Go (tested, deterministic, benchmarked)
- JSON API + TypeScript types generated from the Go structs
- Web frontend reproducing the three-scenario comparison from live data
- Interactive dashboard (controls, network view, spread animation)
- Single-binary deploy (embedded frontend), public Docker image
- Hosted demo (aios-demo.justinvisser.org)
- Intervention optimisation under a budget
Quick start (development)
Prerequisites: Go 1.26+, Node 20+.
git clone https://github.com/JustinZeus/spreadlab
cd spreadlab
./dev.sh
dev.sh starts the Go API (localhost:8080) and the Vite dev server
(localhost:5173, proxying /api), and installs frontend dependencies on
first run. One Ctrl-C stops everything. Or run the two halves manually:
go run ./cmd/spreadlab # API on localhost:8080
cd web && npm run dev # frontend on localhost:5173
go run ./cmd/spreadlab -table prints the three-scenario comparison to the
terminal as a quick engine sanity check.
Deploy
Every merge to main publishes a public image to
ghcr.io/justinzeus/spreadlab, tagged latest and the commit SHA (for
rollbacks). The image is self-contained: one Go binary with the built
frontend embedded, serving the dashboard on /, the API under /api,
and /healthz. A healthcheck is baked in (the binary probes its own
/healthz; the distroless base has no shell).
To run it:
docker run -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/justinzeus/spreadlab:latest
Behind a reverse proxy, attach the container to the proxy's docker network instead of publishing ports and point the proxy at port 8080.
Project layout
| Path | What it is |
|---|---|
internal/engine/ |
Pure simulation engine; no web dependencies |
internal/api/ |
Thin JSON API over the engine |
cmd/spreadlab/ |
Server binary |
web/ |
Vue 3 + TypeScript frontend (Vite) |
web/src/types/ |
TypeScript types generated from the Go structs |
The Go structs in internal/engine/scenario.go are the single source of
truth for parameters and results. web/src/types/ is generated from them
(via tygo); never edit those files by
hand. After changing Config, Result, or the API response types:
go generate ./...
Checks
go test ./... # engine + API tests
golangci-lint run ./... # Go linter
go test -bench=. -benchmem ./internal/engine/ # benchmark baseline
cd web && npm run test:unit && npm run lint && npm run type-check
CI runs the same checks, plus a guard that the generated TypeScript types are in sync with the Go structs.
Background
spreadlab started as the proof-of-concept tool of a university grant proposal on AI in an open society; the model semantics were ported from the Python prototype used in that project's pitch. The subject is handled from the prevention side only: the tool models how harmful content spreads and what education changes, nothing about creating such content.
The model's diffusion and education parameters were sourced by the project team from open-access literature on misinformation spread, complex contagion, peer aggression, and comprehensive sexuality education.
This public demo is the accessible, intuition-building layer of the proposed research. The funded project would build the full instrument behind it: calibrating the model to real-school data, incorporating the complete literature parameter set, and searching for the best intervention under a budget.
References: P. Holme & B. J. Kim, Growing scale-free networks with tunable clustering (Phys. Rev. E 65, 2002). D. Kempe, J. Kleinberg & E. Tardos, Maximizing the spread of influence through a social network (KDD 2003).