"probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

The two talking, and other races, are machines that cover themselves however they like. These two are machines with artificial skins. That is normal. Fully meat beings are not. At least that is how I always read this story.

I interpreted this in two different ways:

* This is a virtual environment and the "meat actors" are depicting avatars of virtual/not-meat entities inhabiting that world. That's why there's inconsistencies with real life, for example the red guy's clothes. This was what I thought when I first saw this short.

* This was really an exchange of concepts and data in a language not really suitable for humans to understand. So what you are seeing is not what actually took place, but a translation. Some machine took the abstract data interchange and translated it to what it thought would be more appropriate for a meat head to understand, including setting it up in an environment that would make sense to a human. But it made some mistakes (the clothes, the weird behavior of some characters). This could have predicted AI Video slop, in a way.

You should probably go watch the Terminator movies.

They only look like meat to blend in. It's the only way to figure out if they're made out of meat.

You're interpreting it overly literally. Cinema can be as abstract as theatre or the written word.

Plus for the story to make sense, they have to be seeing Earth from scans/sensors, and one of them must in fact not be familiar with Earth at all, having disbelief in what the other is saying. But if they are both there, in a diner, they cannot be as skeptical.

I get the constraints of short indie films, I love them regardless, but in this particular case it completely misses the mark.

It was funny when they talked about meat sounds using meat sounds.