normally i would just go make my own post responding to something like this but i do think that this advice is harmful enough that i feel compelled to respond directly
taking advantage of hobbyists' willingness to be underpaid for their labor or to work for exposure is absolutely not the way to handle trying to make a project you do not have the budget for. exploiting people who have a passion for what they do is a problem that plagues the games industry at every level and we should be doing everything in our power to discourage those sort of working relationships within our peers, not acting like it's somehow a win win.
it's genuinely great that your housemate has the financial security and free time available that she can do fun little jobs for $5 like the one you described, and i don't think her willingness to do this is somehow wrong in any way, but i think extrapolating that situation into a rule of thumb for how people trying to do indie dev projects should behave is completely irresponsible.
in general i dont think being a hobbyist means it's right for you to be underpaid. but something i think very much worth noting is that a not insignificant amount of those people you can find easily on youtube may not necessarily be "hobbyists" as much as they are people who have accepted they will not be able to break into the voice acting scene. many of these people are also very likely to be quite young and have less experience setting boundaries for themselves in professional or semi-professional contexts. Understanding that AI voice generation reduces the opportunities for paid VO work means understanding that a desperation for any amount of income for doing what they do or any kind of credit they could put on a resume is going to make people more willing to agree to exploitative working relationships than they should be.
if you're okay with amateur voice acting in your project, try starting with people you already know instead of soliciting internet strangers. people you already have rapport with, who might already be familiar with you and believe in the project you're working on, who you can be reasonably certain are in a place where providing you their labor without compensation isn't putting them out.
a big part of working on large scale projects is also learning to compromise between your vision and what is actually feasible. shifting your scope to something that is within your budget is always going to be the better choice than finding sneaky ways to get more labor out of your fellow creatives for less money. additionally, if you're releasing your game for sale, you can put whatever profits you might make towards patching in voice over after the fact. There is plenty of precedent for this in the industry - Disco Elysium released in 2019 and wasn't fully voiced until 2021, for example.
also something to keep in mind if you're making a for-profit game is the possibility of getting people on board with a profit sharing set up instead of just offering trivial or otherwise subpar compensation on the front end. Sure, the odds of any one indie game making bank are pretty low, but they're never zero, and I'm sure a lot of people would be more comfortable participating in an indie project as a partner in that game's future success than as a hired grunt.
basically, you have a lot of options here, and soliciting internet strangers to work for free or for essentially nothing would ideally never be in consideration at all. and at the very least it shouldn't be the first piece of advice we offer to people who have ideas bigger than their budgets and more of something considered an absolute last resort. i don't want a world full of ai voice acting but i want a world where independent creatives take advantage of each other even less.
